#3
Inspired by
How Students Experience an Ungraded Classroom
Original abstract
This panel will bring together three students from two different ungraded courses that were taught during the proposer's first implementation of an alternative grading approach. In these ungraded courses, students received formative feedback throughout the semester and engaged in guided grading reflections. They then met with the instructor individually at the end of the semester to self-assign their own final grades.
The student panelists will be invited to provide an honest account of their experiences in these courses. They will share their first impressions, discomforts, and uncertainties. They will also share how this grading approach impacted their motivation in the course and their perception of academic challenge. The panel will include students from different majors, different background experiences, and different neurotypes to emphasize how experiences can vary across diverse identities.
This panel is for instructors who are interested in experimenting with alternative grading practices or those already engaged in such approaches. They will gain insight into how students perceive self-evaluation, the impact that new grading approaches have on students' perceptions of workload and anxiety, and where there are opportunities to better support students, especially those who are neurodivergent. The primary objective of this session is to emphasize the role of students as active agents in shaping alternative grading approaches.
Questions: 1.) What was your first impression of the ungraded format and how did your perception of self-assessment change throughout the semester? 2.) What was challenging about the grading approach? How did you adapt or what support from your instructor was most helpful? 3.) Do you think that this grading approach enhanced your learning experience? 4.) What do you wish the instructor would have done differently? 5.) What advice would you give to future instructors who use this approach? What advice would you give to future students?
The point of this panel might not be to progress reform, but many in general do have that ambition, so that lens is what’s motivating this essay. I say this cautiously, as a recent student: I question whether conversations like this move the needle. On the contrary, I worry they could influence us in unconstructive directions, such as disproportionately valuing a practice’s popularity with students.
De facto, student perception is a factor in evaluating grading practice, but it’s a heuristic and a constraint. It shouldn’t be treated as a design principle, which could be implied in emphasizing students as active agents in shaping alternative grading approaches. Confusing grading-approach with education, especially at the level of design, seems counter-productive and arguably anti-educational (for example, in a Deweyan sense).
In other essays, I’ve gestured at the broad political and philosophical dichotomy in education as the spiritual and utilitarian camps, where the spiritual camp prizes the philosophical and sociological facets of education but the utilitarian camp favors systemization, predictability, and effectiveness, economic or otherwise. In both camps, however, student perception—actually any stakeholder’s perception—is best seen as a heuristic concern.
But what is student perception a heuristic for? Students’ interests and needs, I think, in the abstract educational and economic senses: interest in better understanding the world and oneself; interest in social and economic progress. And the shape of their relationship to grading is obvious: it is adversarial. In fact, it’s sometimes argued that grades are designed to inhibit these interests.
In light of this, isn’t it futile, in broad strokes, to interview student perception of alternatives, which are inspired directly by the status quo’s adversarial nature? I would expect these conversations to yield insight oriented around the reduction or mitigation of this adversarial relationship, but that addresses a symptom, not the disease itself, nor movement towards the students’ interests. So I fear the relief resulting from these insights might be temporary, especially as alternative practices coexist inside a dominant, adversarial paradigm.
I’m not interested in incremental band aids anymore; I don’t think any of us should be. Students need more, Education needs more, and grading is only a part of the puzzle. We can’t lose sight of that. Iterative improvements make sense in isolation, but the issues in education aren’t isolated, and the system and inertia are such that the issues are compounding and expanding at a rate overwhelming the cumulative improvements in various facets of education. Heuristically, this is why policy and pedagogical reform historically feel like they’re too little too late. I don’t think we can afford that anymore—is there a point when we’re too late?
We know the education system is in a bad place; we know there are untenable flaws in grading practices and many other practices of the system, so shouldn’t we be figuring out better plans to fix them? Are students on the critical path for that?