Below you will find an outline of my current grading policy and the reasons behind it. If you have any questions or comments about what you see here, please send me an email at Thomas.Gribble@tusd1.org or fill out the contact form on this website. I have also written extensively about these ideas and will maintain a blog throughout the school year about how this grading policy seems to be working, and you can view that blog here. I appreciate your patience and open-mindedness as I work with this system and try to come up with the most equitable grading policy I can!
My grading policy this year is my latest attempt at minimizing the role of grades in the classroom. As explained in detail below, grades get in the way of learning. Throughout the school year a Pass/Fail mark will be maintained in the gradebook that will be based on assessments, both formative and summative. Students will receive feedback on all submitted work, routinely reflect on their performance in the class, and ultimately will give themselves a letter grade at the end of the semester.
School is a place where students go to learn. They learn about different subjects, how to interact with peers and adults, and how to successfully transition into the next phase of their lives. The teacher's job is to help them learn these important lessons. It is not the teacher's job to rank students and gatekeep their opportunities for future success. That is precisely what grades do. If you have read any of my writing on this website before (in my previous grading policy or in my blog), you will know my thoughts on grades can be summarized like this:
Traditional grading systems are mathematically inaccurate, are prone to bias, and tend to be discouraging to students. Equitable grading practices can do a lot to fix some of these issues, however,
Letter grades are inconsistent between classes of the same teacher, different teachers of the same class, different schools in the same district, etc. The difference between an "A" and "B" (and a "B" and a "C", etc.) is not well-defined. As a result,
Letter grades relay very little information about a student, and while there may be a correlation between GPA and the overall "readiness" of a student to succeed in the next phase of their life (college or career), it is irresponsible to not acknowledge the context in which that GPA was "earned" or calculated. Which is to say,
In a fictional ideal scenario, where a teacher has perfectly reliable, objectively graded standardized testing (multiple choice or correct/incorrect) that constitutes a student's entire grade in the class with no room for subjectivity or intangibles whatsoever, that teacher can be confident that there is a difference between a student who has 90% in the gradebook and one that has an 89%. In a traditional grading scale, one student will receive an "A" and one would receive a "B". That letter mark would then be translated for some reason back to a numerical value where one of those students would receive 25% fewer grade points. Even in this impossible scenario, this practice is absurd. However,
Despite the inconsistency of grades and the absurdity of the grade point average, society has determined that a student's GPA can be deterministic of whether they qualify for financial and educational opportunities in the future. Finally, as a result,
Students are systemically encouraged to do everything in their power to get the highest possible grades in school. This leads to the oft bemoaned practices of cheating, grade grubbing, and unhealthy competition among students - all of which undermine the intended and accepted purpose of school.
In short, the main reason behind my grading policy this year is that I believe, in agreement with the vast majority of research conducted on the subject, that grades and grading have a negative effect on student learning outcomes.
This might seem a bit radical and certainly not what most people reading this right now experienced in their own schooling, so I will attempt to provide a bit more justification of this by giving a brief history of grades, a brief overview of grading reform attempts in the past, quotes and links to prevailing research on the topic, and a list of recommended further reading.
What follows is an attempt to summarize an incredible work on the history of grades and the A-F system - Schneider, J., & Hutt, E. (2013). Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 46(2), 201–224. [Full Text].
It is easy to think that grades have always been a part of school. The ubiquity of letter grades means that very few of us have known anything other than their inevitability.
The widely-accepted first use of anything resembling grades in education was in 1785 at Yale University, where students were ranked holistically in their senior year as Optimi (best), Second Optimi (second best), inferiores (less good), or Perjores (worse).
In 1837 Harvard University was the first to rank students on a 100 point scale where students were bunched into groups based on a bell curve with 50 being the average. As more and more of the population had access to education and more institutions were established to provide it, the standard of what comprised a "50" on this scale became muddied. Furthermore, the distribution of this scale meant there could only be a certain number of students in each category. With education quickly becoming widespread and eventually compulsory, schools developed myriad methods to communicate student ability in a way that was legible to all stakeholders - students, parents, employers, and future educational institutions.
Decades of iteration eventually led to three intertwined methods of ranking students - the A-F scale, the 100 point scale (skewed negatively into 5 categories correlating to the A-F), and a 4 point scale which would be applied to the A-F letters. This system truly emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, and by the 1970s over 80 percent of schools were using the letter grade system.
It is important to know here that this was never universally agreed upon as an optimal means of student measurement and ranking. This time period was also marked by an exponential rise in competition for the limited spots higher education, so the valid concerns about consistency of letter grades and the use of grades and ranking as an extrinsic motivation tool were no match for the need to legibly communicate student ability externally and upwardly at scale, no matter how flawed the method.
For as long as we've sought a standardized method for evaluating student ability, there have been critics.
In 1845, Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann wrote in his ninth annual report about the danger of marks as extrinsic motivation:
If superior rank at recitation be the object, then, as soon as that superiority is obtained, the spring of desire and of effort for that occasion relaxes. The pupil knows that the record, "perfect," set against his name, will stand, whatever fading-out of the lesson there may be from his mind. He dismissed, therefore, all thought of the last lesson, and concentrates his energies upon the next; and this becomes his history from day to day... But, to the pupil who studies for the sake of understanding and retaining the subject-matter of the lesson, the recitation is only one of the early stages in the progress of his investigations...if it leads pupils to cultivate a memory for words rather than an understanding of things; and it be found that the knowledge acquired through its instrumentality is short-lived, because it has been acquired for the temporary purpose of the recitation or examination rather than for usefulness in after-life,....no one will deny that emulation may be plied to such a degree of intensity as to incur moral hazards and delinquencies.
In 1913, Isidor Edward Finkelstein in The Marking System in Theory and Practice:
When we consider the practically universal use in all educational institutions of a system of marks, whether numbers or letters, to indicate scholastic attainment of the pupils or students in these institutions, and when we remember how very great stress is laid by teachers and pupils alike upon these marks as real measures or indicators of attainment, we can but be astonished at the blind faith that has been felt in the reliability of the marking system. School administrators have been using with confidence an absolutely uncalibrated instrument... What faults appear in the marking system that we are now using, and how can these be avoided or minimized?
1918, economist Thorstein Veblen:
...system of academic grading and credit... resistlessly bends more and more of current instruction to its mechanical tests and progressively sterilizes all personal initiative and ambition that comes within its sweep.
I could go on with this list but I'll fast forward to 2011 and Alfie Kohn's The Case Against Grades. This is perhaps the most comprehensive and concise work that I've encountered on why grades need to go. If I were King of the World, this would be required reading for anyone in the education field. It is centered around this:
..when students from elementary school to college who are led to focus on grades are compared with those who aren’t, the results support three robust conclusions:
Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning. A “grading orientation” and a “learning orientation” have been shown to be inversely related and, as far as I can tell, every study that has ever investigated the impact on intrinsic motivation of receiving grades (or instructions that emphasize the importance of getting good grades) has found a negative effect.
Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task. Impress upon students that what they’re doing will count toward their grade, and their response will likely be to avoid taking any unnecessary intellectual risks. They’ll choose a shorter book, or a project on a familiar topic, in order to minimize the chance of doing poorly — not because they’re “unmotivated” but because they’re rational. They’re responding to adults who, by telling them the goal is to get a good mark, have sent the message that success matters more than learning.
Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. They may skim books for what they’ll “need to know.” They’re less likely to wonder, say, “How can we be sure that’s true?” than to ask “Is this going to be on the test?” In one experiment, students told they’d be graded on how well they learned a social studies lesson had more trouble understanding the main point of the text than did students who were told that no grades would be involved. Even on a measure of rote recall, the graded group remembered fewer facts a week later (Grolnick and Ryan, 1987).
Kohn's essay concludes:
Indeed, research suggests that the common tendency of students to focus on grades doesn’t reflect an innate predilection or a “learning style” to be accommodated; rather, it’s due to having been led for years to work for grades. In one study (Butler, 1992), some students were encouraged to think about how well they performed at a creative task while others were just invited to be imaginative. Each student was then taken to a room that contained a pile of pictures that other people had drawn in response to the same instructions. It also contained some information that told them how to figure out their “creativity score.” Sure enough, the children who were told to think about their performance now wanted to know how they had done relative to their peers; those who had been allowed to become immersed in the task were more interested in seeing what their peers had done.
Grades don’t prepare children for the “real world” — unless one has in mind a world where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant. Nor are grades a necessary part of schooling, any more than paddling or taking extended dictation could be described that way. Still, it takes courage to do right by kids in an era when the quantitative matters more than the qualitative, when meeting (someone else’s) standards counts for more than exploring ideas, and when anything “rigorous” is automatically assumed to be valuable. We have to be willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, which in this case means asking not how to improve grades but how to jettison them once and for all.
The gist of all of this thinking - from early critics of grade standardization to current advocates for equity in the classroom - has, for better or worse, been labeled as "Ungrading". I don't love the term but it has a ring to it. Ungrading is an umbrella term for all of the alternate grading practices that teachers around the country and around the world are workshopping or have been using with success in their classrooms. Common versions of ungrading that you may have heard before are standards-based grading (or mastery-based grading), specifications grading, contract grading... It's all working towards the same goal, which is to create a learning environment for our students that minimizes the focus on grades so that students can work towards achieving their educational goals.
If there have always been efforts to reform traditional grading practices to remove the fear of bad marks from distracting students from the real purpose of school, why is this all gaining steam now, and why are you (Mr. Gribble) doing it?
I think there are two main reasons (and dozens of secondary reasons) why the "Ungrading Movement" is getting more traction now than ever before. The first is technology. The recent mass-adoption of learning management systems (LMS) - the same systems designed to make the act of assessing students and communicating information as algorithmic and impersonal as possible - has allowed teachers to be more efficient with their time in terms of providing feedback to students. Helpful feedback is an important pillar of ungrading, and providing helpful feedback has always been a very time consuming thing. When a teacher (like me) has 150 students, it is not just difficult but impossible to do this without the assistance of technology. The second is the COVID-19 Pandemic. Not the virus itself, but the way that it exposed the systemic inequities in the traditional grading systems we use the world over. We've always known that not all students have the same opportunities and access to success at school. Switching to online learning, students dropping off our radars, and the inevitable "learning loss" that was quoted so frequently by the media, and then higher-ed adjusting their admissions practices as a result, highlighted that what we have been doing for the last 75 years or so is not only not serving a wide swath of students, but isn't really...necessary?
For me personally, some of the aforementioned secondary reasons were the straw the broke the camel's back. For the past 5 years I have been trying to employ equitable grading practices in my classroom, more intensely since returning to in-person learning during the 2021-2022 school year. The large (>95%) majority of my students have responded positively to these changes. Despite this, I continue to see students become overwhelmed with stress on a daily basis - stress about their grades, their report card, their GPA, the impact that has on their likelihood of admission to their dream school, whether they will qualify for a scholarship their family desperately needs... It is disheartening to me to see these incredible students get so caught up in something that should be so minor and yet has had such an enormous systemic value placed on it. This desire - this need - to get good grades consumes them to the point where school becomes a game; how can they get the highest grade possible as easily as possible.
Pulfrey, Caroline & Buchs, Céline & Butera, Fabrizio. (2011). Why Grades Engender Performance-Avoidance Goals: The Mediating Role of Autonomous Motivation. Journal of Educational Psychology. 103. 683-700. 10.1037/a0023911.
White CB, Fantone JC. Pass-fail grading: laying the foundation for self-regulated learning. Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 2010 Oct;15(4):469-77.
Crooks, A. D. (1933). Marks and Marking Systems: A Digest. The Journal of Educational Research, 27(4), 259–272. [not recent]
Davidson, Cathy. How Do We Measure What Really Counts in the Classroom? Fast Company. 20 September, 2012.
Kohn, A. (1993). Punished by rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A's, praise, and other bribes. Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
How will this affect my student's GPA?
Same as any class, students will still receive an A-F letter grade at the end of the term per governing board policy. The P/F maintained throughout the semester does not impact GPA, but those progress and quarter report cards do not calculate into GPA.
How will this affect my student's eligibility for sports or extra curriculars?
It won't. However, students can still have a "Fail" grade in the class, which would exclude them from these activities in the same way an "F" would in a traditional grading scheme.
Does this mean you will not be grading my student's work?
It depends what you mean by "grading". My suspicion is that when students and parents think of the grading that teachers do, they imagine the constructive feedback, notes, and perhaps checking for correctness more than just writing a score or a letter on top of the paper. I will still be reviewing student work, providing feedback, and recording that information, but I will not be giving a final score or letter grade on individual assignments or assessments.
How will my student receive a grade in the class?
Students will maintain a portfolio of sorts where they log how well they did on assessments that map to the different standards/topics covered in the class. Ideally each standard/topic will be assessed multiple times - providing multiple opportunities for success. At the end of the semester, students will complete a reflection activity where they take stock of the data they have logged and assign themselves a letter grade for the class.
What if my student gives themselves a grade lower than what they should get?
Throughout the school year I become quite familiar with your student's strengths and weaknesses in a way a letter grade could never hope to convey. I will not allow a student to give themselves a grade lower than they deserve (I will override the grade).
So theoretically my student can do nothing or do very poorly all semester and still give themselves an "A"?
Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. I trust students to be honest with their self-evaluations and do not anticipate this to be a problem. However, students can and should fail the class if they have not met minimum requirements and/or are not at all prepared for the next course they will need to take (I will override grades in this instance). Giving a student who is not ready a passing grade and sending them along to the next class is not beneficial to anyone involved.
Do you think it is fair if my student does immaculate work all year long, while another student does not do as well or work as hard but they both give themselves the same grade at the end?
I am sorry to tell you that this already happens on a regular basis (with the teacher giving the grades). My hope with this setup is that students worry about their grades as little as possible, freeing them up to explore the topics of the class with curiosity and without concern for making mistakes. So yes, if both students believe they have made a strong effort in the class to apply themselves and they both experienced success, I think it is fair that they get the same grade.
Are you sure this is going to work?
No. However, as I regularly preach to my students, you have to try new things if you want to improve. Nothing changes if nothing changes. Also, it's quite easy for me to reverse course with this if it doesn't go well during the first semester and I can't think of a good way to fix it for the second semester. That being said, I trust my students and am confident that this is the way.
Students will be given feedback on all assessments in class. These assessments will be in at least the three following formats: bi-weekly quizzes, bi-weekly deep-dives*, unit tests. Students will also have regularly assigned practice problems to check their understanding on the topics covered throughout the course. Solutions will be provided for these problem sets whenever possible, and students should partake in as much of this practice outside of class as they feel is necessary to gain a solid understanding of the procedural side of the content.
When students receive feedback on the assessments, they will fill out a log that is broken into course topics where they will qualitatively and quantitatively describe how well they did on the assessments. Ideally there will be 2 or 3 times that each topic is assessed, so there are multiple chances to improve (these improvements will also be logged).
At the end of the term (end of each semester), students will complete a cumulative reflection activity in which they look holistically at their performance throughout the class and assign themselves a letter grade that best represents that performance.
(*a deep-dive will be a more conceptual problem or set of problems that students work together on to apply their recently-acquired knowledge. These are meant to be challenging and many will require the use of technology.)
So that's about it. I don't know if I could be a teacher if I didn't continuously try to improve the learning experience for my students. This new grading policy is my latest attempt to minimize the omnipresent stress of grades so students can use their energy on exploring the topics in my class with curiosity and without the fear of consequences for making mistakes. Learning cannot take place if the learner is afraid of making mistakes, and so long as grades are used as extrinsic motivators, students are discouraged from taking risks and making those mistakes. If you have any questions about this policy or anything else, please send me an email. Thomas.Gribble@tusd1.org
If you want to read more about all this, these would be my main two recommendations:
On why, Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop by Jesse Stommel
On how, Robert Talbert's blog, Grading for Growth