Tag Archives: grading

Liberal Arts

My Experiment in #UnGrading

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A long time ago a couple of my colleagues and I in the history department were talking with a professor in the School of Education. He worked closely with our students who sought the certification and credentialing that would allow them to teach social studies in New York schools.  He mentioned one of our students, who he said was one of the best natural teachers he ever had seen.  No one, he said, had been so effective at so young an age in conveying important historical content to secondary-schoolers with such grace and style.  When he told us who this student was, I felt some surprise.  This particular student was a nice kid, but across the board we had viewed him as at best an extremely average C+/B- student. 

Obviously, this young man took what he learned in our courses and turned it into something magical. This experience made clear to me that there is no necessary relationship between the grades we give and what students learn in our courses.

I have written about grades and grading on this blog before.  I responded to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by an Emory University professor who described himself as an “Easy A.” I have wondered about the relationship between grading and the challenges of student retention. And I always have been uncomfortable, at some level, with the power relationship inherent in grading student work. Giving a bad grade closes doors on students, and restricts opportunities available to them to pursue further studies.

This past semester, I undertook my first experiment in “ungrading.” I stopped scoring papers, opting instead to write lengthy comments. And I met with each student—I teach about 90 to 100 students a semester—during Finals Week for individual conferences.  They handed in their final papers, and they told me what they thought they deserved for the course.  I wanted to encourage student input into the grading process.

Those meetings are complete, and I have had a chance to reflect on the experience. I learned a lot. First, students seem to like this change.  They told me that for the most part it caused them less stress than more traditional forms of grading.  There were some exceptions to this.  First-year students, fresh from high school and a regimen of standardized tests, sometimes expressed frustration at not knowing where they stood.  

Second, the power relationship in grading is still present.  A small number of students wildly overstated, in my view, the quality of their performance in the class.  A student who came to a third of our class meetings, did not participate in our discussions, and who watched videos on his laptop thought he deserved a B when I thought he was failing the course.  What to do then? I pointed out why I thought his estimation was too high. Sometimes, I must remind myself, a student and I might not agree.  We talked about what he had learned, and it was then that he persuaded me that he took from my class more than his work and his engagement showed. I have him a D, but I felt terrible about it.

This brings me to a third, and very important, point.  Students are fair and honest about their performance in class. Sometimes they criticized themselves for things I had not noticed.  For the most part, they did not make excuses. But there are exceptions.  “Non-Traditional” students and transfer students tended to grade themselves far too harshly.  Our college is much more demanding than the community colleges our transfer students attend. It is understandable that they may feel overwhelmed by the increased workload and the higher expectations. That sense of being adrift manifested in them feeling, I suspect, that they were not doing as well as they were.  The same thing goes for students of color, who thought much less of their work than I did. But overall, students were honest about their strengths and weaknesses.  I have taught at Geneseo for twenty years, and this did not surprise me at all.

Not everything went as well as I would have liked.  I need to improve my record-keeping and communication, so I am going to begin making more use of the college’s learning management system, specifically for communicating with students on their work and offering comments, criticism, and encouragement.  I will also devote a portion of my first class meeting to collaborating with the students on drawing up a list of standards for assigning final grades. (We are required to submit final letter grades).  In this I have drawn much inspiration from Cate Denial who is light years ahead of me in her thinking about assessment and student learning. You can see something of how I envision next semester’s ungrading system in the syllabus for my course in Indigenous Law and Public Policy that I posted a couple of days ago.

I fully recognize that my approach will not work for everyone or in every field, and that my concerns about grading may not be shared by all.  But I felt little attachment to the way I customarily had graded, and felt the need to do something new.  I have not worked all the bugs out of the system, but I am glad I made the change. 

When I mentioned that I was thinking of making this change, some friends told me that I would be overwhelmed, and that every student would ask for an “A” for their final grade.  That simply was not the case.  What the system has done is eliminate some of the stress grading causes students, replace it with a system that recognizes improvement and effort. It is based upon a recognition that not all students enter my classes with the same baseline knowledge and cultural capital, and that relative growth is significant.  It allows students influence and ownership of the grading system.  Most of all, it has allowed me to experiment with a system that eliminates the Olympian pretense that in my view influences too much grading.  There is no Platonic standard, and different students excel in different ways.  It is easy in this line of work to fall into a routine, to assign the same things year after year, and recycle the same notes and materials.  It is easy to assume that my standards are correct, appropriate, and always better than those that students might propose, and to forget that grading can be imperfect, imprecise, subject to my moods and my fatigue levels.  I have much to learn as a scholar and as a teacher.  I can always do my job better. And as I continue on this journey, I am hopeful that it will benefit students.

Liberal Arts

What’s In A Grade?

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Why do we give grades? Do they bear a meaningful relationship to what students have learned? Do they reflect accurately a student’s abilities in a given field, or her mastery of a given body of knowledge? 

            I understand that questions like these, for many of my fellow college professors, are answered through the “assessment” of how well students meet our stated “learning outcomes,” bulleted and bold-faced, on our course syllabi.  I am not sure we are doing our students a service with the way we grade.

            But a lot of my colleagues see value in the enterprise. They must feel this way. After all, the continue to collect essays their students write.  “This paper is an 88,” they might say. “But this one is an 86, and that one a 74.”  They may have a “rubric,” with columns and rows, which they suggest reduces their grading to a system. Not only is it objective and measurable, but beyond question, too.  “I am not in the business of negotiating grades,” a former colleague of mine writes on his syllabus.  Look at the rubric.

            They will write comments on their students’ papers, like “you need to develop your argument more fully,” or “your paper lacks a clear and coherent thesis,” or “I wish you had put more time into this assignment,” or “you need to realize you are not in high school anymore.” But you didn’t, so you get a 78.

            These are all comments I have read on student papers.  And I am hardly without blame.  I, too, used to grade like this.  I don’t anymore.

            At the opening weekend for first-year students at Loyola Marymount University, a school which my daughter thought she would attend for four years, the faculty member chosen to deliver the opening convocation address said, “at Loyola Marymount University, we don’t give grades. Students earn them” The audience went wild.

            What a load of nonsense.

            She was no Olympian, dispensing wisdom from on high. Grading is inexact. It is by its nature imprecise. We read a paper, engage with the writer’s words, and look at the argument.  Perhaps we measure what we have before us against our rubric, which this Loyola professor might view as some sort of Platonic standard of student excellence, the Form of the Good Essay.  But we are giving numerical or letter scores to something that cannot be measured precisely.

            I have written on this blog about grades and grading, and the relationship between grades and student retention. I worry that the entire enterprise of grading can do our students a disservice. It stresses them out for one thing, because of the growing tyranny of GPA in setting the metes and bounds of their future opportunities. If you determine a student has performed poorly or only adequately in your class and you give that student a “C,” it is entirely possible that you have closed more doors for that student than you and your course ever opened for them.  They may objectively be worse off, in the long run, for having taken your course.  We do not take enough responsibility for the grades we give and the unquestioned power claim to give them.

            I have been reading lately the work of professors, like the fantastic Cate Denial, who are altering their approach to grading (I have not met Cate face to face, but I am looking forward to meeting her when she comes to Geneseo in March).  I have found this work inspiring, and after far too long, I have decided to start making some significant and fundamental changes to how I engage with my students. I have to enter grades at the end of the semester.  There is no changing that. But I can transform that process in ways that I believe will serve students better. I want them to learn, I want them to enjoy history as much as I do.  And I want them to see its importance.  And like the forced worship that, to Roger Williams, must “stinketh in God’s nostrils,” I do not believe I can coerce students into learning through quizzes and the external motivation of a letter grade.

            This semester I decided to move away from scoring papers.  I ask my students to submit their papers and journals to me electronically as a document.  As I read, I make extensive comments on the argument, evidence, and style.  I also try to use these marginal comments to offer instruction in those areas where I feel the student has room for improvement. It is easy to tell students not to do this or that; it is much more challenging to show them how to do things right.

            In the past, when I read these papers, I might start thinking of scores and grades.  I might have felt conflicted in the past about whether a paper deserved a B, or a B+, or an A-, or what amount of points I might give to an essay.

            I realize that these may be my own idiosyncrasies, and that what I am proposing will not work for everyone.  There are many, many, many excellent professors who inspire students, change their lives for the better, and teach them effectively using conventional grading methods. What I am proposing, furthermore, I recognize will probably not work well in every subject. Still, half way through the semester, and I find that the students appreciate what it is that I am trying to do.

            Students receive back their papers with detailed commentary.  I mention what I thought they did well, where they need to improve, and how I think they might best do that.  I am honest. When I feel that a paper included careless errors, or that the student may not have proofread his or her paper, I point it out and give reasons why I feel that way.  I tell that them that people who read what they write, now and in the future, may judge them harshly for their misspellings and grammatical errors. Some students have been poorly prepared for college writing. They were not taught the importance of editing, proofreading, and writing multiple drafts.  Some have not been asked to read widely.  For some of them, then, weak writing is not their fault, so the emphasis is always on getting better.

            By the end of the semester, I will have folders on each student, containing all their written work, along with my comments.  The students and I have this material in front of us when we meet during finals week to discuss their final grade.  At our meeting, I ask the students to come prepared to discuss the following questions:

  • What did you learn this semester in this course? What new information did you find most surprising?
  • In what ways did you grow and develop as a scholar and a Historian?
  • What do you think of the work you did this semester? Were you satisfied with its quality? Are there things you might have done better?
  • What grade do you believe you deserve for the course and why?

We will discuss these questions and, I hope, arrive at some sort of agreement.

            I have been warned by friends that I will face endless arguments, that the “grade grubbers” will wheedle and whine until they get the “A” they want.   Others, who have actually tried something like this, find that students are harsh in their assessment of their own work.  I do not know for certain what is going to happen.  But I would find this job very difficult to do if I did not believe that students are honest, that they want to learn, and that I can learn much from them.  And, what’s more, I believe this: It costs me nothing to grade generously, to listen to students, to constantly reassess my own standards, and to take seriously the students’ own assessment of what they have taken from my classes.

Liberal Arts, Teaching Native American History

Easy A

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Over the break, while sitting in the airport in Las Vegas, I took a few minutes to read Gary Landerman’s essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Why I’m Easy: On Giving Lots of A’s.”

Landerman correctly notes that many of our students experience enormous amounts of stress in college.  Grades, he correctly argues, wield enormous influence in determining the sorts of opportunities a graduate will enjoy.  Part of Landerman’s plan, then, “is to try to show love and empathy rather than contempt and derision, as some of my colleagues do.  Hell, students already have enough stress and uncertainty in their lives, as they adjust to living on their own, making new friends, feeding themselves, and taking crazy-making courses” in other fields.

Landerman seems to teach a significant number of general education courses on a variety of topics in his field of Religious Studies.  Some of these courses are quite large, enrolling more than two hundred students.  Landerman wants the content in these courses “to go down easily and smoothly, to be both entertaining and effortless—a nice break from their other courses, which are sober, regimented, and demanding.”

There are some obvious counter-arguments.  Not all required courses for majors are “crazy-making,” “sober,” and “demanding.”  A professor can maintain high standards in courses covering difficult subject matter in a manner that is not contemptuous and derisive.  I have many colleagues who show a great deal of empathy and love to their students while forcing them to work their way through challenging assignments.  If you have taught for as long as I have, you will learn that it is not uncommon for students to love professors who made them work their asses off.  And Landerman, it seems to me, seems to underestimate just how “stimulating” and “entertaining” the demanding courses that majors take can be.

There was a time when concerns such as these would have led me to dismiss Landerman’s essay entirely, to be so annoyed by his claim that he can get away with what he does because he is tenured that I would completely tune him out.  The students he sees seem more fragile, less able to handle hardship and adversity than those I have known, and far less willing to tackle difficult work.

Landerman teaches large classes, he tells us.  In a class with two hundred students, it is obviously impossible to engage every student in discussions. It is difficult to develop assessments for classes that large that measure the students’ grasp of abstract concepts.  Landerman, indeed, tells us that his exams are easy, and multiple choice.  He does not have to spend a lot of time grading, and jokes that only idiots struggle to receive an A or a B in his classes.

Still, Landerman raises an issue about which I do not hear enough discussion.  “Why,” Landerman asks, “should I assign a grade to an effort at human growth?”  Setting aside the obvious answer that in efforts at human growth, some students work harder and are more successful improving themselves than others, maybe it would be better to ask different questions: what do I want students to get out of my classes, and what is the relationship between the grades I give and actual learning?

I have a colleague, for example, who assigns her students a handful of short papers, ten or so, over the course of the semester.  This she does in lieu of exams.  The paper assignments require students to confront weighty topics.  It is demanding work.  And students must complete all the papers.  So, let’s say, a student completes nine of the ten essays, and earns an “A” on each paper.  Some situation, however, whether a family emergency, an illness, a breakup, or a simple mistake in keeping track of assignments and due dates, keeps the student from turning in the tenth paper.  That student would fail my colleague’s course.

Where is the justice in that?  The policy strikes me as punitive and pedantic. There is no relationship between that student’s failing grade and what she learned over the course of the semester.

I understand that some professors believe students should be “responsible.”  Good training for the real world, they say.  They want to teach students that deadlines matter.  Most of their students, I believe, understand that perfectly well from high school, and if you know a historian who has never missed a deadline, I hope you will introduce me to that sparkly unicorn.  We may not be the people best suited to provide lessons on the subject, “Deadlines Matter.”

This is an extreme example, but there have been many occasions where I have wondered about the relationship between an assignment, the grade, and student learning.  I know that I have made mistakes, and that I have given assignments that did not necessarily measure well the student’s learning.  I still feel like there is a lot I can learn. As a result, I have become more flexible, and that flexibility has led me to be more lenient in my grading. I still require a lot of work but, like Professor Landerman, I have become a generous grader.

Like him, I want my students to think about complex issues.  I want them to engage with important and challenging ideas.  Students in my classes have written essays of such grace, beauty, and intelligence that they have moved me to tears.  Other students write with not nearly that much ease. They struggle to express themselves. They come into my class less well-prepared, or with fewer academic or educational resources than their “Straight A” classmates, but they may have travelled father to get there.  They may have learned more.  They may have been more affected by what they read or, I hope,  by what we talked about in class, than students who perform better in terms of standard measures of student learning and achievement.  Like Professor Landerman, I want to help in a small way to expand these kids’ horizons. I feel fortunate that I can remember how easy it is to be turned on by something I learned in class, that I remember how an idea can change your life.

Just this morning, at the opening convocation at Loyola Marymount University, I listened to the faculty member chosen to address the students and their parents say that at LMU, “Faculty don’t give students’ grades; at LMU, students earn their grades.”  The line received a good deal of applause, but it struck me as completely inane.  This speaker had given a talk that, it seemed to me, revealed a contemptuous attitude toward her students.  You need an alarm clock to succeed, she said, because you do not want to oversleep.  Do your homework. Read the syllabus.  Give me a break.  I hate statements like these that so underestimate students.  As for the grading part of her speech, she seemed to remove her own biases and beliefs and values from the equation.  The students do the work. I decide what they have earned.  But of course she is giving grades, and if she is not careful and conscious and thoughtful, she may enter scores and marks that reflect more what she expected from the students than what they actually learned.  As the parent of a freshman sitting in that audience, I found that a chilling and depressing thought.