Learning to See the Water: An Experiment in Ungrading

When I embarked on my experiment in ungrading, I thought I knew why I was doing it and what its benefits would be. In a world where the pressure around grades and transcripts, and the college admissions to which they are stepping stones, seems, impossibly, to keep intensifying, this was a way to opt out.¹ There is a large and rapidly-growing literature about the stress that the meritocratic system places on kids, even the kids who succeed under it. Two important recent additions to the literature are Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (New York: Penguin Press, 2019) and Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020). Ilana Horwitz’s book God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), while primarily written about Christian students, has some interesting insights for our population. Earlier books on this topic include Walter Kirn’s personal narrative Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever (New York: Doubleday, 2009) and William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014.) One profoundly dismaying article about the impact that living in the meritocratic pressure cooker has on our children is Suniya S. Luthar, Nina L. Kumar, and Nicole Zillmer, “High-Achieving Schools Connote Risks for Adolescents: Problems Documented, Processes Implicated, and Directions for Interventions.” American Psychologist 75, no. 7 (October 1, 2020): 983–95. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000556. And of course, articles about meritocracy, its discontents, and challenges to it can be found regularly on the pages of The Atlantic Monthly. To lessen the pressure on my students, to engage in learning for learning’s sake, to help them breathe. But if no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, no lesson plan survives first contact with the students. (Not, of course, that students are the enemy. But they are unpredictable actors, in ways that similarly confound teachers’ best-laid plans.) What I discovered in the two and a half years that I have been experimenting with ungrading is that there are real limits on how much can be achieved in the realms of relieving pressure or lifting college-related stress when one carves out a single small island of ungrading in an entirely graded, high-pressure ecosystem. What ungrading can accomplish, even on that small scale, is perhaps even more revolutionary (albeit in a way that less directly benefits students’ lives).

Ungrading intentionally sets aside the implicit threat of the grade that, consciously or not, colors teachers’ interactions with students. And in doing so, it lays bare the power dynamics that drive so much of the enterprise of school as we currently engage in it.

In their work Laboratory Life, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar²Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) propose a novel and even subversive way to think about a large institutional laboratory. If we look at the laboratory as a black box whose inner workings are unknown, but whose work can be understood from an analysis of the visible inputs and outputs, then a laboratory is a factory for the production of scientific papers. What emerges from a laboratory is not knowledge, or life-saving discoveries, or human advancement. It is publishable papers.

If we apply that Laboratory Life analysis to school systems–knowing nothing about what happens inside the building, analyzing its workings solely on the basis of input and output–it is not a reach to say that our educational system is a factory for the production of transcripts. We have students whom we hope we have shaped or guided along the way. They have knowledge, skills, and character growth, none of which is neatly measurable or quantifiable. But the thing that we produce at the end of a high school education, the product that can be weighed and measured, ranked and averaged, sent on to the next institution or ratified by a diploma, is the transcript.

Students and parents respond rationally to the incentives that system creates. If your transcript will play a significant role in what your college options will be, it makes sense to angle for the most eye-catching transcript possible: the haggling over test scores, the pressure to move into higher tracks, the request for extra credit to gild final grades. We teachers can cluck our tongues or roll our eyes about the parents who ask for a meeting with the principal to relitigate an A minus or the student who comes back early in senior year to ask what he can do to raise his grade in a freshman course. But all of that, crass and offputting though it may be, is a rational response to the incentives the system puts in front of them.

When I began my ungrading experiment, what I thought bothered me most about this was the pressure it put on students: the relentless need to do and achieve and amass. An accelerated class wasn’t good enough if there was an honors class to be had; there were no “blessings of a B minus,”³ Wendy Mogel, The Blessings of a B Minus: Raising Resilient Teenagers (New York: Scribner, 2011) and there weren’t any blessings of an A minus, either. Too many of our students seem to be buckling under that pressure. What I came to see was that underlying all of that is the profound way in we as teachers use grading to “discipline and punish” ⁴ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975) while distancing ourselves from the uncomfortable confrontation with the reality that that’s what we’re doing.

I had been a teacher for more than two decades, and I only fully realized that I had been holding a weapon after I laid it down.

I’ll share some stories of my ungrading experiment, what worked and what didn’t. I learned an enormous amount about my students, about my teaching, about the hidden curriculum and invisible systems in my classroom–in all of our classrooms. But most of all, I learned that I had, wittingly or not, been threatening my students for two decades–threatening them with the greatest harm I could do them: the tarnishing of their transcripts.

My introduction to ungrading came first through online encounters with vocal practitioners of ungrading and robust groups of experimenters, and then through reading works such as Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) edited by Susan D. Blum.⁵Susan Blum, editor, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What to Do Instead) (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020) The nature of this undertaking is that one learns from other teachers’ experience, gleaning ideas or lessons from what they have tried, gathering bits of wisdom to assemble a model. The model of ungrading I proposed that first year was a tentative first step and reflected that I was doing my ungrading experiment within a larger graded system. I imagined that I would not grade students’ tests or essays–only provide them with feedback on what they had gotten right or wrong–but would give them semester grades in January and June.

My students responded with forceful indignation. “If you are giving us grades in January,” one argued, “then you are of course grading our tests. You are simply holding those grades in your head, in a complete lack of transparency, rather than sharing them with us. That is not ungrading at all: it is secret grading.”

The claim was powerful, and correct, even if it came from a student who otherwise did not demonstrate a great deal of commitment to our class. And so, with trepidation, I acquiesced. Students would give themselves grades in January and June, subject to my overriding any grade that was wildly inconsistent with the student’s apparent performance. (I can hear the dubious responses. But since I told students I reserved the right to alter grades, and after the first year I provided students a clearer rubric to guide the grading, their self-assessed grades were generally within reason. There might have been many more A-s where I would have given B+s, but that was a price that I was willing to pay.)

That encounter is the first time that I can remember experiencing the ways in which ungrading reordered the usual power dynamic in the classroom. I had come in with a plan, but something, whether it was the culture fostered by the experiment in ungrading or just the space created by upending the usual classroom way of doing things, made my student feel that he could articulate an objection to the structure of the whole undertaking and ask for a change. And when I acquiesced that first time, I both practiced wielding less power and demonstrated to the students that their voices would be heard more in this new system. Giving up grading, it turned out, changed everything about my class. And in so doing, it illuminated the extent to which, consciously or not, grading had shaped everything about my class to that point.

In that first year, I still gave tests, assessments, and assignments. Incongruously, I was doing an experiment in ungrading in an AP class, as a result of my teaching load having shifted from a 10th grade history class to a 12th grade Advanced Placement elective after I had already decided that I wanted to embark on ungrading. (The lack of alignment between the imperatives of preparing students for a high-stakes exam at the end of an AP course and the desire to explore ungrading would lead to my eventually dropping the AP course in favor of continuing the ungrading experiment in a non-AP history course in the third year.) But I returned the tests with answers marked correct or incorrect, without any numbers attached, a form of feedback that one of my ungrading books referred to as “scored but not graded.”

I learned so much about teaching, learning, and classroom power dynamics along the way. Sometimes, the lessons were funny: students pointed out that, absent the ability to take off one, two, or more points for partially correct but less-than-ideal answers, I had fallen into a fairly consistent pattern of marking answers with a check mark, an “okay,” an “ehh,” a “not really,” or a “no.” While that made perfect sense to me as a descending order, it was not clear to students whether “ehh” was better or worse than “not really.” Without the clear ranking of a minus two or a minus three, I had to explain what my comments meant and how they compared to one another.

But the differences didn’t start when the tests were returned with my comments. The differences were felt in preparing for exams. Where students generally devote a fair amount of their exam preparation time to gaming out what the instructor will ask, and how, shifting to an ungrading model freed them up to study the material without worrying where my question-asking would focus. The much-hated-by-teachers refrain “will this be on the test?” disappeared entirely. (As teachers, we hate it because it reveals how much students’ engagement is directed towards grades rather than learning, but don’t acknowledge the ways the system in which we operate incentivizes, even demands, that query.)

On exams, when students often ask many questions trying to suss out exactly what the teacher is asking (or trying to get the teacher to inadvertently divulge the correct answer), my students had many fewer questions. After the exam, there was no haggling over individual questions–”You didn’t tell us you were going to ask this!” or “there were two right answers to that question!” And once tests were returned, there was no haggling over points. (Hard to haggle that a “not really” should be upgraded to an “ehh.”) When students did ask questions, it was to clarify what they were unsure of or to understand why an answer was incorrect. It was only when I shifted to ungrading that I saw clearly how much of the time, energy, and anxiety around testing goes not into mastering and recalling the material but into anticipating what the teacher will ask, and how, and how he will evaluate the answers he receives. Because teachers have the all-important power to give grades, so much of what happens in a standard classroom is oriented towards the teacher, what she wants and expects, and what her standards are. Shifting the focus away from that allows the students to think about what they are learning and what they want to learn, how they demonstrate knowledge and skills, and how they assess their own success.

Two more explicit examples of how grades are often used to discipline and punish, and how the classroom shifts when that weapon is intentionally and transparently set aside: once, my students were acting up in class, and I, half-joking and half-seriously, declared “Sit down now or I’ll….” One student piped up, “Or you’ll take three points off the grade you’re not giving us?” I cracked up, as did the class, but it made the point clear: grades are often a way to wield power and to coerce the control we cannot otherwise get.

Another day, I began class with a discussion of reading assigned for homework. The students were not as well-prepared as I expected them to be, and so I reverted to the first resort of the annoyed teacher. “Take out a piece of paper and put your name at the top,” I declared, in the time-honored formula announcing a pop quiz. I gave four questions about the reading, which they answered, and which we then reviewed. But when students began to pass their papers up to me, I stopped them. “This is an ungraded class. This exercise was for you, to know how well you’re doing. If you got all four right, make a smiley face on your paper and go home and hang it up on your refrigerator. If you got none right, do the reading for tomorrow.” (At the end of the semester, when giving himself a grade and justifying it, one student wrote, “and I got two smiley faces on quizzes.”)

In my first year of ungrading, I gave students a feedback form to fill out after every test as well as a longer form to accompany their self-assessed January and June grades. In my second year of ungrading, I was no longer experimenting solo. Two other SAR teachers, one in the high school and one in the middle school, were ungrading as well, and we met regularly to discuss our efforts. It was from my middle school colleague, Ms. Rebecca Glassberg, that I got the idea to ask students to come to parent-teacher conferences–not to listen in as I gave feedback to their parents, but to give the feedback themselves as I listened in. In each of these realms, hearing students’ voices about their own experiences as learners, and their own assessments as to how they were doing, was revelatory. And it was invited by the nature of the ungrading experiment, which had as its explicit premise that my perspective on and assessment of what happens in the classroom is not the only true one. More than that: it may not even be the most authoritative or valuable one.

Before parent-teacher conferences, I told my students that they would be the stars of the evening. One student, taking this mandate very seriously, waited for his parents to join my Zoom before bursting through the French doors behind them in a tuxedo. While funny, and very characteristic of the particular student, this was also illustrative of the greater point: the students, certainly by the time they’re seniors, should be central voices in considering what is and is not working for them in the class.

The examples are legion. One student was routinely busy on her computer in class doing things that were clearly not note-taking. Yet, frustratingly for the teacher seeking to catch the multitasking student in distraction, whenever I called on her, she knew the answer. At conferences, unprompted, she raised the issue: “I know I’m doing other things in class and you call me out for it. But I always know what’s going on, and I do well on tests, so I think it’s working.” (If my re-creation of her precise words seems to imply disrespect, there was none in her presentation.) We as adults, of course, decide all the time how many other things we can do during a Zoom meeting while still getting the gist of what’s going on. Rather than simply punishing a student for not meeting my expectations, ungrading invited her to articulate her own expectations and to say that she thought she was meeting them well enough. (She was, and I allowed it to continue. In cases where students’ devices have posed so much of a distraction that it is no longer working, I do banish their devices from my class.)

Another student, in the first ungrading class, wrote to me, “I wanted you to know how much I’m investing in this class, even though it’s ungraded. So I pushed myself to speak in class, even though it’s uncomfortable for me. In most classes, I don’t say anything until halfway through the year. But in this class, I started speaking up after the first quarter.” I would have noticed that he began contributing to class after the first quarter and might have commented positively to his parents about that. But that would have been my assessment of what he was doing, and I would have had no deeper understanding. By silencing my own voice and seeking his, I learned that this was uncomfortable for him and that it was his intentional choice to do it nevertheless.

Another student, in the second year, a very strong student who excelled in my class, reported that “In a normal class if I get a 100, I don’t think about how I studied. The self-reflection after the test checks me in.” Again, when grading is a power wielded solely by the teacher, the only thing of importance is how well the student meets the teacher’s expectations. Once the teacher’s expectations are removed from the picture (or at least the power to dispense rewards for meeting those expectations is removed from the picture), the student is invited instead to reflect on what she has learned and how, not whether she has done what I wanted.

And finally: in Susan Blum’s edited volume Ungrading, one of the contributors mentions that if you allow students to grade themselves, some students will give themselves lower grades than you would have given them. I’m not sure I initially believed this, but I do now because I have seen it. Every single year, I have had one or two students submit excessively self-critical self-reflections, giving themselves lower grades than I would ever have given them. In 100% of the cases, the highly critical self-graders have been girls. That, too, shed a great deal of light, both on these individual girls’ experiences and on broader forces in our school community and society that I would not have had insight into if I simply awarded these stellar students their rightful A plus. (In those cases, I changed the grades. Those are the only grades I have changed throughout this ungrading experiment: the grades I raised because girls were too harsh on themselves.)

Did ungrading work for everyone? It most decidedly did not. There were some students who openly acknowledged, on their feedback or self-assessment forms, that grades are motivating to them, and without that motivation, they simply did not invest as much in this class. Other students reported that they were very interested in the class but had to engage in a cost-benefit analysis as to where to spend their time, and the return on investment was higher for time spent studying for a test in a graded class that would affect their transcript than in studying for an ungraded class.

Beyond that, in my first year, when my self-assessment and self-grading rubric was wide open, some students assigned themselves grades that were far higher than warranted because they summoned up some measure of justification for those grades. One student, whose aggressive argumentation and unwillingness to consider other points of view derailed classroom discussion more than it contributed to it and often discouraged others from sharing their differing perspectives, gave himself a high grade in the class because “I make things interesting.” Realizing that I had not given my students sufficiently clear and detailed guidelines on which to base their self-grading, the next year I required that they adhere to a more detailed rubric that took into account their performance across a number of realms and did not allow their self-perceived excellence in one realm to dominate their grade.

This is another way in which ungrading is not an uncomplicated success: it is enormously demanding of teachers. I could imagine some time in the future in which we have all shifted our classrooms to ungrading, and the assessments exist, the rubrics exist, the mechanisms to make things run smoothly exist–but for now, for all that I have had the benefit of the collective wisdom of the ungrading internet and the closer-in wisdom of my colleagues Sarah Medved and Rebecca Glassberg who engaged in the ungrading experiment with me after year one, it has been a great deal of work. Every single thing about how a classroom runs has to be rethought. Do I use the same assignment or assessments but score them differently? Do I need new assignments and assessments? If things don’t seem to be working as well as I’d like, how do I change course? Scoring a test and then also reading students’ self-assessments about it; or giving them a rubric to self-assess an essay and then reviewing it to make sure that they’re on target; asking them to designate a goal for what skill they’d like to work to improve and then seeing if they are improving in that realm; all of these are much more work for teachers than giving an assignment and grading it. And at times when other demands of school life have meant that I can’t be as flexible and responsive to the realities of this group of kids in this class this year as I’d like, I have not always felt good about how I’m doing at ungrading.

And of course, the goal that I began with, to lessen my students’ stress and anxiety, was met only partially, if at all. The reality that my class is only one of many that my students take, and that I teach them in senior year when their performance feels very high stakes for college acceptances, means that even if I stop grading and marginally lessen the pressure on them, the wheels of the system continue to grind.

But this honest acknowledgement of the ways ungrading doesn’t always work, or doesn’t work for everyone, or doesn’t work perfectly, needs to be laid against the very obvious: grading doesn’t work for everyone, either, but we don’t question it because it’s the status quo. When a student is wracked by anxiety about testing and grades; or when parents are excessively aggressive in lobbying for an extra point or grade increment; or when we de-emphasize student voice in describing and analyzing their own experience in the classroom; no one says, “Well, that’s grading. It doesn’t really work for everyone, does it?” The question we need to ask is not whether ungrading is perfect or without any challenges or complications. We need to ask whether it’s better.

In delivering the 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, the late David Foster Wallace began with a parable: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’” As a school ecosystem, grading is the water we swim in. It creates the conditions under which we do everything we do, and yet we hardly notice it, question its effects, or consider how things might be different. Experimenting with ungrading has given me a chance to see the water. Ungrading isn’t perfect. It doesn’t work for everyone in the same way. But in placing students at the center of the undertaking of learning, in renouncing the explicit power and implicit threat of grading, and in deemphasizing me–my choices, my assessments, my judgments–in the classroom space, it has allowed me to envision how the water might change to the benefit of everyone swimming in it. I can’t imagine going back.

• 1
  There is a large and rapidly-growing literature about the stress that the meritocratic system places on kids, even the kids who succeed under it. Two important recent additions to the literature are Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (New York: Penguin Press, 2019) and Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020). Ilana Horwitz’s book God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), while primarily written about Christian students, has some interesting insights for our population. Earlier books on this topic include Walter Kirn’s personal narrative Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever (New York: Doubleday, 2009) and William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014.) One profoundly dismaying article about the impact that living in the meritocratic pressure cooker has on our children is Suniya S. Luthar, Nina L. Kumar, and Nicole Zillmer, “High-Achieving Schools Connote Risks for Adolescents: Problems Documented, Processes Implicated, and Directions for Interventions.” American Psychologist 75, no. 7 (October 1, 2020): 983–95. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000556. And of course, articles about meritocracy, its discontents, and challenges to it can be found regularly on the pages of The Atlantic Monthly.
• 2
  Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)
• 3
  Wendy Mogel, The Blessings of a B Minus: Raising Resilient Teenagers (New York: Scribner, 2011)
• 4
  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975)
• 5
  Susan Blum, editor, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What to Do Instead) (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020)