A first step towards ungrading

 

I’ve spoken with many educators curious about ungrading but unsure of how to begin. What follows is my best suggestion for how to begin, not based on how I started my own journey to Full Monty Ungrading, but based on what I think is a reasonable way to start given my experiences.

One of the most meaningful aspects of ungrading is the reflection students engage in. Before I ungraded my courses (i.e., for most of my career) I did not ask students to reflect on their learning, benefits, or process at all. That was a huge omission on my part. Plenty of SoTL research demonstrates the benefits of this type of metacognition. Those benefits accrue both to students and instructors. Students gain appreciation for how they’ve changed because of their engagement in a course and they can alter their process if they recognize its limitations. Instructors gain insights into students’ process and challenges. Reflection is a win for all.

In my courses students reflect on their progress and process when they propose their midterm and final grades. I suggest that students do more than just propose the letter grade that my university requires I submit. I suggest that they reflect on their progress towards the SLOs in the course, the strengths and limitations of their learning process, and discuss what outside (of the course) factors played a role in their engagement in our course. Sometimes I have them write this up as a small paper, other times I have students complete a form with a series of prompts. Whatever the format, these student submissions are always the most insightful and rewarding student work I read all year. Just a joy to read.

My proposal is that instructors could simply add the grade proposal as an additional activity for their course, keeping everything else the same as it was before. All the same activities, assignments, grades, points, scores, etc., just add the midterm and final grade reflection and grade proposal. Instructors could even inform students what grade they would receive based entirely on the traditional calculation of the points/scores, but giving students the option to propose a different grade based on their reflections. The instructor could retain the power to submit the proposed grade or the calculated grade.

This first step on the path to ungrading has the clear benefit of not requiring any changes to existing course design, activities, or grade calculation. This can also work in any type of class: STEM, lab, composition, skill-based, lecture, seminar, independent study, you name it. Yes, reading the grade proposals adds work for students and instructors. But reflecting helps students, helps instructors, and deepens the connections between students and instructors. Just do it.

Ungrading and academic integrity

Don’t call a threat an opportunity

Don’t call it integrity when you really mean compliance

My university has an academic integrity policy, and who could argue against integrity? If only the policy was really about integrity. Instead, the policy is really about rules, and the consequences of violations of those rules. It indicates that faculty are obligated to initiate a process when they detect student conduct that runs afoul of those rules. The process starts with faculty confronting students with evidence of their violation(s) and can culminate with a hearing and potentially the student’s dismissal. Faculty were recently informed that should the student retain counsel for that hearing that the university would provide counsel for the faculty.

I don’t see much emphasis on integrity in this policy. To be clear, I think our academic integrity policy is fair and clear. But it really is a compliance policy, or perhaps a punishment policy, not an integrity policy. The few times when I’ve engaged with the process I have found it distasteful and without benefit to student or faculty. There was no examination of the context of the behavior in question. The only thing the students learned was that I (and the university) was their adversary.

Considerable scholarship exists about academic cheating, and the topic has gained attention during the pivot to online instruction as a result of the pandemic. Software that locks down browsers, facial recognition, eye tracking; we’ve sacrificed privacy on the alter of rigor, and trusting students has never been an option.

In my opinion students cheat for one of three reasons (or some combination): students don’t see the value in doing the work, or they don’t believe they can achieve that value if they do the work required of them, or they don’t know how to complete the work. Students cheat because they see the work as busy work, work that has no value. My students aren’t lazy. They have jobs in addition to school, they have family obligations, they have financial concerns that sometimes include housing and food insecurity. They also binge watch entertainment and play video games for hours on end. They have the ability to pay attention when their circumstances and their interests allow it.

The solution to cheating is to address the motivation to cheat, not the consequences of cheating. Why would students cheat if they believed in the value (benefit) of the work, believed the work would produce the benefit, and believed they could complete the work? Our job as faculty is convince students of the first two ideas and help them with the third. And then we trust students to act in their own self-interest.

The problem with general education courses

I continue to believe that the most significant barriers to improving (most) general education courses is the requirement to cover certain content and the mindset that students must “master” that content. Both ideas are harmful illusions. I know that in Intro to Psychology it is impossible for me to in any way adequately cover the full range of possible topics, and it is impossible for students to master any one of those topics. These two ideas restrict the pedagogy I use. I am forced to try to cover every major idea in psychology, no matter how relevant to my students’ lives, and I must move at such a fast pace that depth in any area is impossible. It’s like learning about geology by looking out the window of a car traveling 90 mph.

If content coverage and mastery are not realistic goals, then what are the achievable goals for general education courses? I would propose these two:

• Students’ lives are improved after class is over
• Students want to learn more about topic/discipline after class is over

The first goal reflects the goal that we all have for general education courses. The philosophy of a liberal education is that it improves students’ lives to know something about art and anthropology, and cultures and chemistry, and math and music. The main job of general education instructors is to figure out how their course can improve students’ lives, and then convince students of this fact.

The second goal reflects the impossibility of content coverage and mastery, and puts the emphasis on continual or life-long learning. Since they will not be trying to master the content they are free to explore the ideas they find the most fascinating. Students will ideally want to explore these ideas long after the course is over. Information is now free to access and abundant. What citizens need are better information search skills and filters. If we give students those skills they will be able to pay attention to reliable and valid sources to pursue their professional and personal goals.

What students need is to discover the disciplines represented in general education and how those disciplines can improve their lives.