Grading and Ungrading Fall 2020 Updates

I have done a variety of moves the last couple of years moving towards ungrading. I've moved to students grade conferencing, telling me what grade they think their work earns and why based on required elements we've covered in class. I've tried it in all of my classes, composition to upper level English classes. In addition to this I've played around with ungraded low stakes, practice assignments where students get 100 just for turning it in, and these assignments counting as 75% for their grade, ensuring a student can earn at least a C. The last 25% determined by a final paper or project or portfolio.

For the most part these have all gone well. Students struggle at first with the idea of focusing on learning and practice rather than grades but for the most part they seem to like it.

It's rare- like 2-3 students maybe out of 150 in a semester- that students either do not accept the feedback I give or grade their work as an "A" when it's clearly not. I can tell you that I hamster wheel about those more than anything else.

This summer was my best version of all this. I taught technical writing and their only grade was their final portfolio at the end of the class. We worked all summer. They turned in work, they got feedback, they applied it. But their grade was their grade, which they argued for at the end of the semester, based on their portfolio which reflected their revised work from the whole class. 

As much as I loved how this worked, loved the approach to teaching, loved how students came around and embraced it, loved reading their reflections, I did not follow through on this this semester. I was worried that with so much else going on with Covid-19 and politics and all the stresses students would be under that it was a complication that might make things harder for students and that was the opposite of what I designed my classes this fall to do.

So in the spring I am moving, for all my classes, to a 100% of your grade is your final portfolio, where the students present a supported reasoning for their grade. We will do work and assignments and projects all semester that they will share and workshop and receive feedback on but these will be formative only. Their only grade will be that portfolio. 

1. This is where I want to be, so I'm going to stop taking half steps.
2. I think actually with everything going on this will help students because I think it will mitigate. how some feel if they've gotten behind they can't recover.
3. It allows me to spend more time on the teaching and feedback .

For my Shakespeare and Capstone classes I think this will be an easy sell because most of those students will have had me before, so their other classes with me and the stuff above we've done has prepped them for this. For my composition classes it'll take some more work. I plan on asking them at the beginning to reflect on their experience with grades and feedback, how it's made them feel in the past, what they think the point of grades is, and use all that as an opening for talking about my rationale for doing this.

I've made a new page for my class webpage that lays out my rationale, pulls together a lot of disparate thoughts, and tries (and I hope succeeeds) in explaining to the students how and why I'm doing this. I've tried to gesture towards all the really smart people who have done this groundbreaking work for decades. What I'm doing is not new it's just trying to figure out the best way to apply what others have set up.

For what it's worth, even with struggling and trying to figure out what serves students best, I think all this is better, even with not totally ungrading, I think all this is better. It is better not to base your relationships with students in antagonism. It is better to let students have agency over their learning. It is better to teach students how to advocate for themselves and present solid evidence to back themselves up.