In mid-June 2023, just as I started putting this special issue together, I received an email from the Chronicle of Higher Education with the following question as its subject line: “Is ‘Ungrading’ an Upgrade?” The email was fortuitous, of course, because ungrading was very much on my mind, but also for another reason: I had just finished talking to students in my online first-year composition course about the importance of incorporating questions into academic writing. We discussed how writing should be used as a form of inquiry to help one learn and think in new ways. However, I also warned my students against the very kind of question that appeared in the subject line—a closed question meant to be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” I encouraged my students, instead, to ask open-ended questions that allow for exploration and inquiry. Of course, subject lines are meant to grab one's attention, and this one was no different with the play on the words “ungrading” and “upgrade.” Still, the subject line models binary thinking (also something I warn my students against!) and oversimplifies the complex subject that is assessment. I hope this special issue on ungrading does better.
Perhaps because assessment is so complex, assessment practices have long been a contentious subject. What criteria should we use to assess students? What are the best ways to assess students’ learning? How can we create equitable assessment practices? This special issue explores the recent rise of a range of ungrading practices. The term ungrading is a bit of a misnomer. These approaches to assessment don't do away with grades altogether but rather, as Jesse Stommel describes in his contribution to this issue, “rais[e] an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice” by minimizing or eliminating the use of traditional grades, such as the A – F scale or percentages out of 100. Ungrading practices focus, instead, on levels of labor and engagement, meaningful feedback from the instructor and/or other students, as well as self-reflective forms of assessment. These practices also often foreground compassion and empathy. Simply put, the premise of ungrading is that learning happens whether or not students are graded and, moreover, that learning is often deeper when grades are minimized or not part of the equation at all.
Although some define ungrading as an umbrella term to describe all alternative grading practices, others, such as Stommel, in this special issue, describe ungrading “as one possible entry point into a long history of practices that push back on traditional grades.” While the term ungrading may not reflect all alternative grading practices, there is consensus that ungrading practices are varied, to which the many forms of ungrading described in this special issue attest.
The heightened attention to grading and the move toward alternative grading practices since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which popularized assessment methods such as ungrading, was in large part an emergency response to a pandemic that posed challenges for students and disproportionately so for students of color. With racial disparities at the forefront of Americans’ minds, and further magnified by the murder of George Floyd in the early months of the pandemic, many instructors at the postsecondary level found themselves reflecting on their role in perpetuating racial and other injustices. Ungrading, although not new, became one way to dismantle traditional assessment practices and, in turn, one of the racist structures within America's educational system. Instructors adopted ungrading practices in part because they were viewed as a socially just form of assessment.
While I may not have used the term socially just or even ungrading at the time, my initial foray into ungrading was motivated by my commitment to fairness. The same, it seems, could be said of the contributors to this special issue. About two decades ago, after my first few years of teaching, I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with traditional grading methods. As such, I tried out various forms of portfolio grading. Since roughly 2003, I have continued to reflect on and revise my assessment practices.
The most significant shift in my own assessment practices came recently and is described in my book, The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (Carillo 2021), which is generously referenced by some contributors to this special issue. While indebted to Inoue's foundational work on labor-based contract grading, The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading critiques labor-based contract grading through the lens of disability studies and, drawing on the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), proposes what I call engagement-based contract grading.
Like many of the ungrading practices described in this special issue, the primary pedagogical goal of engagement-based grading is combatting the inequities perpetuated by traditional grading systems that purport to evaluate students on a single “objective” standard but, instead, reward students from privileged backgrounds. As the contributions to this special issue attest, though, ungrading practices are no less complex than other grading practices. Neither are they a panacea. All assessment practices—and, perhaps, ungrading approaches especially because of their connection to liberatory and critical pedagogies—must consistently be revised and adapted, a point articulated so clearly by Griffin Zimmerman in this issue. In fact, since introducing engagement-based contract grading to the field of writing studies just a few years ago, I have already removed the contract component because it revealed itself as biased within my particular context. I now refer to this pedagogy as simply engagement-based grading. For a detailed account of revisions to their own ungrading practices, see Esther M. Gabay and Cheryl Hogue Smith's “The Complex Lives of Bees: Breaking Hive-Mind Grading Practices in Community College Classes” in this issue.
As this introduction already suggests, this special issue includes scholars inquiring into ungrading practices from a range of perspectives. Contributors work at large public universities or small, private colleges, two-year community colleges and four-year institutions. Perspectives from graduate-students, non-tenure-track, tenure-track, and tenured faculty are represented as are perspectives from contributors of color and those who identify as nonbinary, transgender, neurodivergent, and disabled. The range of perspectives on ungrading included here celebrate its uses, raise important questions about this assessment method, complicate its value for instructors and students of color and those from marginalized groups, and suggest further avenues for research related to ungrading. All of the contributors ask probing questions about ungrading and foreground the complexities surrounding this form of assessment. This special issue contends that the time is ripe to reflect on ungrading, initially an emergency grading practice that has become a permanent fixture for some but has been left behind by others who reverted to traditional grading practices as the pandemic waned.
Organized to accommodate different kinds of readers, this special issue should be accessible to those who already possess a familiarity with ungrading and those who do not. The issue opens with an introduction to ungrading by Jesse Stommel, a leading expert on the subject, who provides some background and history about ungrading. Griffin Xander Zimmerman builds on this introduction in “Enhancing Ungrading: Ideological Assumptions and Disability Justice Interventions,” which explores how pedagogical practices are often informed by unquestioned norms. Zimmerman guides instructors through a series of reflective steps to help them unpack these ideological assumptions while showing how the field of disability justice can help educators achieve ungrading's liberatory goals. These two articles lay the foundation for the rest of the articles, most of which assume a working knowledge of ungrading and provide readers with an even deeper dive into the subject matter.
Cowritten by Molly E. Ubbesen, Aaron Bruenger, and Bronson Lemer, all of whom facilitated different versions of ungrading that promote accessibility, “Accessible Ungrading” details these varied approaches and draws from student reflections to demonstrate how students prefer to be (un)graded. Although primarily positive, these student reflections include compelling criticisms, too. Katherine Daily O'Meara also foregrounds students’ voices as she recounts her use of and students’ responses to engagement-based grading contracts. Her piece “In Absolute Control of My Own Grading Destiny”: Student Reflections on Engagement-Based Grading Contracts” reveals how engagement-based grading contracts provided support particularly for students with multiple mental health diagnoses.
In the following article, Esther M. Gabay and Cheryl Hogue Smith discuss their varied experiences using different forms of ungrading, including labor-based grading and specifications grading, in the community college context. Exploring the unanticipated negative consequences of applying these as isolated grading practices, the coauthors argue for the importance of combining assessment approaches in order to meet the needs of their students. Writing from a similar context, Jessica Nastal details how labor-based contract grading and specifications grading produced unintended negative consequences for historically and multiply marginalized students in her writing classes at two public, suburban, Midwestern two-year colleges. In “A Sociocognitive Grading Model for First-Year Writing Classes,” she proposes instead the use of a sociocognitive grading model designed to maximize course-level success rates for New Majority college students.
With Catherine Gabor's “Just One More Thing?: International Students’ Perceptions of Contract Grading,” the special issue shifts its attention from ungrading students at two-year institutions to ungrading international students. Gabor details the survey results from more than three hundred international and domestic students to compare the students’ perceptions of grading contracts in their writing and writing-intensive courses. While Gabor finds that international students perceive contract grading to have more benefits than drawbacks, she also details the confusion that this approach causes international students and explores ways to mitigate this confusion.
In “Navigating Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Impacts on Student Attitudes and Equity in Writing Assessment,” Kara K. Larson also examines students’ perceptions of and attitudes toward contract grading. Drawing from qualitative and quantitative data collected at an R1 university, Larson explores correlations between labor-based grading contracts and shifts in student attitudes toward writing and their learning. The results of Larson's study underscore the need for nuanced and context-specific implementation of labor-based grading contracts and encourage a student-centered, antiracist approach in order to meet the needs of and advance opportunities for underrepresented students. Larson reminds us that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all assessment practice—even an ungrading practice—and she closes her piece with a powerful cautionary image: “Let us not become the fools waving from the tower window, holding up our grading contracts as evidence of how antiracist we've become, while students are still locked out below.”
Megan K. Von Bergen's article “Hostile and Hospitable Programmatic Architectures: WPA Work and Ungrading” closes the special issue by exploring ungrading from a writing program administrator's (WPA) perspective. Von Bergen argues that ungrading should not be addressed solely as a classroom-level assessment ecology and must be considered from an institutional standpoint. To this end, she introduces the terms hostile and hospitable to describe programmatic architectures, ultimately positing that by “supporting faculty labor through explicit institutional support and resources, hospitable architecture improves the odds that ungrading will be used, to the benefit of students and teachers alike, in our writing programs.”
When used effectively, assessment practices can affect students in powerful ways. Ungrading, for example, may help to mitigate students’ stress levels. Since I have started using engagement-based grading, the most common feedback students share about this assessment practice is that it reduces their stress levels. Notably, this feedback is consistent across curricular levels and across courses in the English major and the General Education curriculum. One student explained, “This approach in grading helped me a lot. I currently work 40 – 60 hours a week. I take care of my siblings as well as help my mother who is on disability. I have to work to help maintain the mortgage. Having this flexibility and grading scale made me less stressed. I did not feel pressured at all.” Another student noted, “It makes me motivated to do the work because I know I'm gonna get half credit for even trying. The flexibility in this class has helped me a lot with my learning disability. It reduces stress knowing that I don't have to rush to get an assignment done.” A third student described how ungrading was especially useful later in the semester: “As the semester progressed, I was getting burned out and exhausted. Therefore, the system of grading helped me to still contribute by having flexibility of deadlines.” A great deal of the data collected from students and referred to in this special issue, including that from Larson's, Gabor's, O'Meara's, Nastal's, and Ubbesen, Bruenger, and Lemer's respective studies, describe reductions in students’ levels of stress when instructors employ ungrading practices.
Anything we can do as instructors to mitigate students’ stress levels positions students to learn more—and may even have the potential to help them reach graduation, suggests the Lumina Foundation and Gallup (2023a) “State of Higher Education 2023” study. Of the 6,008 student study participants currently enrolled in a postsecondary education program, 41 percent “say they have considered stopping out in the past six months,” up from 37 percent in 2021 and “more than half (55%) of students who have considered dropping out cite emotional stress as a reason they considered leaving, and almost half (47%) considered it due to mental health reasons.” Notably, the Lumina Foundation and Gallup (2023b) published a related report that drew from the same data but highlighted the findings related to students’ mental health. As its title suggests, the report, “Stressed Out and Stopping Out: The Mental Health Crisis in Higher Education,” underscores the relationship between students’ declining mental health and retention efforts. Several other recent studies (Colarossi 2022; Lipson et al. 2022; Elharake et al.) corroborate students’ mental health struggles. Introducing faculty to ungrading practices and supporting them as they employ these practices is crucial and is a potential means not just to stemming inequities (racial and otherwise) in the postsecondary writing classroom but also to supporting students’ mental health, and perhaps even retention efforts.
We must also keep in mind, however, that experimenting with, refining, and justifying ungrading approaches to students can be time-consuming and stressful for instructors. Often these approaches are not supported by learning management systems and depend on some degree of manual input. Creating flexible assessment policies might increase one's workload (and make it less predictable), particularly if one teaches several classes across multiple institutions. While some of the contributions in this issue allude to this additional labor, none explores it in depth. Research in this specific area, namely the effect of ungrading on instructors’ labor practices and mental health, is an important aspect of this discussion. A related aspect of this discussion, addressed most comprehensively by Megan K. Von Bergen in the final contribution to this issue, is how one's racial identity may increase the amount of labor necessary to enact and validate (often to administrators) ungrading practices. Moreover, as Von Bergen concedes, ungrading and similar alternative assessment practices carry great risks for minoritized faculty no matter how hospitable a program may be. Sherri Craig and Laila McCloud, two essential voices on this very subject, were invited to contribute their perspectives to this special issue but, unfortunately, could not.
This special issue is necessarily limited in scope and length, and thereby cannot cover every facet of the discussion surrounding ungrading. Still, it explores the potential of ungrading without ignoring its complexities, ultimately revising the closed question, Is ungrading an upgrade?, posed by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and, instead, asking, To what extent is ungrading an upgrade? We must think seriously about the contexts in which we employ ungrading, the identities that complicate attempts to ungrade, and what all of this means for the students who are being ungraded. I invite you to think about your assessment practices, alongside the contributors, and how the ideas and approaches discussed in these pieces might enhance your own pedagogical work.
