Education, Grades

Ungrading as a Journey: Seeking Ways to Lower Student Stress, Raise Student Engagement

[Header Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash]

Over a forty-year career that includes 18 years teaching public high school English and the current ongoing 22 years teaching at a liberal arts university, I have been assigning no grades to student work (but always required to assign course grades) and not using traditional tests in courses.

Two of the foundational reasons for these instructional commitments are, first, I don’t believe in evaluating students with grades while they are learning (I assign course grades with portfolio assessment at the end of the course or grading period), and, second, since stress lowers students’ ability to perform and learn, I reject grades and tests as stressful conditions.

After a sabbatical last fall, I returned to the classroom invigorated about seeking even better ways to lower student stress while also raising student engagement in courses and assignments (what I call “artifacts of learning,” such as essays).

Not grading assignments proved to be more disruptive for my college students than my high school students. I have had to adjust often in ways that address the anxiety having no grades causes high-achieving students in an academically selective university while honoring my own critical practices.

I have always had a policy of students being required to submit all work in order to pass, which means I also must accept late work. Since I do not grade assignments, there is no late work point deduction (although I do keep records of when students submit assignments and note that patterns of late work reduce the course grade).

Even without grades on assignments and accepting late work, historically students have submitted assignments on time at about a 90+% rate.

One way I addressed the unexpected anxiety of not grading was providing students a broad and performance-based description of how student course grades are grounded in student behaviors (keep in mind most of my students make As or Bs with a very rare C and increasingly one or two Fs):

  • A work: Participating by choice in multiple drafts and conferences beyond the minimum requirements as well as revising and editing beyond responding only to feedback; essay form and content that is nuanced, sophisticated, and well developed (typically more narrow than broad); a high level demonstrated for selecting and incorporating source material in a wide variety of citation formats; submitting work as assigned and meeting due dates (except for illness, etc.); attending and participating in class-based discussion, lessons, and workshops; completing assigned and choice reading of course texts and mentor texts in ways that contribute to class discussions and original writing.
  • B work: Submitting drafts and attending conferences as detailed by the minimum requirements but attending primarily to feedback without revising/editing independently; essay form and content that is solid and distinct from high school writing (typically more narrow than broad); a basic college level demonstrated for selecting and incorporating source material in a wide variety of citation formats; submitting work as assigned and meeting most due dates; attending and participating in class-based discussion, lessons, and workshops; completing assigned and choice reading of texts and mentor texts in ways that contribute to class discussions and original writing.

This added framework, however, seemed to be of little help because students often failed to refer to it, and since Covid, students have begun to turn in work late at a much higher rate and have chosen to fail more often than before Covid.

This semester included one course in which more students routinely submitted work late than on time and the engagement with the course was significantly eroded.

During the semester, to address these developments, I updated my minimum requirements to encourage submitting work on time and throughout the semester:

Minimum Requirements for course credit:
  • Submit all essays in multiple drafts per course schedule before the last day of the course; initial drafts and subsequent drafts should be submitted with great care, as if each is the final submission, but students are expected to participate in process writing throughout the entire semester as a minimum requirement of this course—including a minimum of one conference per major essay.
  • Each essay rewrite (required) must be submitted after the required conference and before the next original essay is due (for example, E1RW must be submitted before E2 submission can be submitted).
  • Demonstrate college-level understanding of proper documentation and citation of sources through at least one well-cited essay or several well-cited essays.

The update is the second bullet, which seeks to keep students submitting and drafting over the entire semester because more students have begun turning in the first submission as much as a week or more late and then failing to submit the required rewrite until near the end of the semester.

One student this semester submitted more rewrites in the last days and the week after the course (before exams) than during the semester. While this student did show growth, the process is not what the course is designed to do over 14 or 15 weeks or work.

The four essay assignments in my first-year writing seminars are cumulative in terms of what students are expected to do and apply to their essays, for example.

Further, for my spring course, I am also implementing course grade contracts, for example:

As I have argued before, both writing and teaching writing are journeys, but my students are teaching me that my commitment to ungrading is also a journey, one that I will continue to share as I seek ways to lower student anxiety while raising student engagement.