We often hear that faculty are concerned their students are only focusing on their grades and not on the process of learning. Jason Hooper, Senior Lecturer of Music Theory, shares how he uses the alternative grading approach called ungrading in his upper-level music theory course to encourage creative risk-taking. 

 

 

 

What is ungrading? 

Ungrading is a way for teachers and students to question the values entailed by our traditional grading system and to work collectively toward different values. It’s not one pedagogical technique. As Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt (2013) have shown, our traditional grading system didn’t become the standard until the 1940s and ’50s, and it does a good job of serving modern bureaucratic functions—or at least it gives us the illusion that it serves these functions—such as ranking student performance, enforcing objective standards, and communicating about performance to other schools, future employers, and so on. Yet, these functions can also hinder learning. Grades and the competition they foster are extrinsic motivators; intellectually and creatively, students who play it safe are rewarded over those who take a risk, fail, and learn something new; and grades become an end in themselves, which corrodes a real education. Ungrading is meant to give students more agency, encourages creative risk-taking, asks students to think about the purpose of their assignments and what happens in the classroom, and involves them in assessing and evaluating their work, including deciding what criteria should be used. In my past teaching, my focus was often on assessing and evaluating content mastery, and traditional grading can work well for that. Over time, I’ve become much more interested in what students think about their work rather than what I think about it. That change in perspective can be revealing for both students and teachers. For anyone interested in ungrading, Jesse Stommel has put together a helpful bibliography.  I also recommend this online post by C. Thi Nguyen.

Why did you decide to use ungrading in your course? 

I use ungrading in an undergraduate music theory course intended for music majors. It’s the last course in our five-semester sequence, and it is the only course where I use ungrading. In this small seminar class, we analyze Western concert music written since 1900. We encounter a variety of composers, musical styles, and techniques, with each composition establishing the rules of its own game. Analyzing these pieces closely is bound to result in different interpretations. I adopted ungrading to encourage students to develop close readings that are well supported but different from my own. With a more traditional grading system, I was concerned that students would not take creative risks and instead try to anticipate my interpretations in search of a better grade. In other words, I was concerned that students would submit what they thought I wanted to hear rather than what they really think. Ungrading also allowed me to ask open-ended and intentionally vague or ambiguous questions on assignments—questions that prompt students to think through particular issues about the content without limiting where their answers might lead them. 

How did you prepare/plan for ungrading and getting your students accustomed to the approach? 

I think ungrading has to be supported by the kind of content being taught for it to work, so we had a lot of intentional discussion at the beginning of the semester to frame the course, first about content and then about ungrading. What is the purpose of musical analysis? Who is musical analysis for? What counts as evidence in an analysis? What counts as an analysis? (For example, is dancing itself a kind of musical analysis?) The students’ answers to these questions were creative and expansive. We then turned to thinking about grading, including ways that traditional modes of grading might limit this expansiveness. 

What has been the impact of ungrading on your students? 

It’s too soon to know. Most of my time using ungrading has coincided with the pandemic, so there are many variables to consider. I can already tell some students find it challenging to develop a strong internal sense of their own learning and its value, so they feel unsure and unsettled. It is much simpler when an authority figure (in this case, the teacher) deems your work “good” or “bad” rather than rely on your internal sense of its worth—but it’s so important to develop an internal sense of one’s learning and its value, even if it is uncomfortable. Other students feel empowered by ungrading and create very elaborate analyses that go beyond anything I could have imagined. I also think students start to question the rest of their education, its purpose, and its value beyond any one class. 

What challenges with ungrading did you encounter? 

There are several challenges to consider, and I’ll mention two. I was initially concerned students would give themselves high grades for assignments they knew were mediocre at best. This is exceedingly rare. The only time I have ever modified a grade determined by a student, which I reserve the right to do in my syllabus, was when I thought the grade was too low. I suspect some students use this as a defense mechanism: they assume teachers think little of their work, so they anticipate and protect against a harsh critique through an even harsher self-evaluation. It’s usually good to have a conversation with the student when this happens; a few supportive words can make a difference. The other challenge I’ll mention is that sometimes students will triage coursework, especially at busy times during the semester, and a course using ungrading is often considered less urgent. This particularly happens when students are concerned about grades and due dates in other courses with more traditional grading structures. For this reason, among many others, it’s especially important to scaffold big projects over at least a few weeks, if not longer, in a course that uses ungrading.