“It made me feel like it was okay to be wrong”: Student experiences with ungrading

Abstract

This paper presents an interpretative phenomenological analysis study of students’ experiences with ungrading in the form of reflection-based self-evaluation in a college course. In the landscape of student evaluation, ungrading strategies respond to the limitations of traditional grading systems, particularly with respect to cultivating in-demand skills and capacities, such as adaptability, creative thinking, and self-management. Through in-depth interviews with eight students, this study reports on four experiential themes that characterize the switch to ungrading: de-gamification, or unsettling the “gamified” nature of evaluation in the traditional grading system; time to think and reflect, creating space for review and the deepening of learning; rich communication, or continual feedback between teacher and student; and learning community, in which students felt like they were part of a team effort rather than siloed individuals. Considerations for further research, as well as implementation of ungrading in other courses, are discussed.

How can we best equip our students to succeed in our fast-changing world? The landscape of work is poised to change in the near future, owing largely to automation and artificial intelligence. Existing roles will evolve, some jobs will disappear, and new jobs will emerge (McKinsey Global Institute, 2017; World Economic Forum, 2016). Moreover, simply having a job is not enough for a fulfilling life; to flourish, our graduates will need to feel their work is meaningful (Brooks, 2019; Graeber, 2018).

Many have written that preparing our students for an increasingly complex, digitally-rooted world will require people skills and abstract cognitive skills (e.g. Martin, 2021). An editorial from the job site Indeed lists eleven skills that hiring managers across industries are continually looking for, including communication, teamwork, adaptability, self-management, problem solving, and open-mindedness (Indeed Editorial Team, 2020).

One vision for education that is attuned to these skills and our evolving social landscape is that of intellectual character. As Ritchhart (2002) writes, intellectual character is:

an umbrella term to cover those dispositions associated with good and productive thinking. In contrast to viewing intelligence as a set of capacities or even skills, the concept of intellectual character recognizes the role of attitude and affect in our everyday cognition and the importance of developed patterns of behavior. (Ritchhart, 2002: 18)

Going above and beyond content knowledge, intellectual character comprises the patterns of good thinking that will serve graduates for a lifetime. These dispositions include open-mindedness (mentioned by Indeed’s editorial team in the list above), as well as other virtues such as thoroughness, attentiveness and a love of learning (Zagzebski, 1996).

This paper focuses on the place of student evaluation within this picture. Student evaluation is typically done within a traditional grading system; but, as will be reviewed below, decades of research has shown many limitations with traditional grading, particularly with respect to cultivating intellectual character. In recent years, educators across subjects and levels have begun experimenting alternatives to traditional grading. These alternatives range from doing away with grades entirely, whether in a single course or at a whole institution, to offering certain grade-free or minimally graded assignments, to creating contracts with students for the standards that qualify for a given letter grade, to centering peer feedback, and beyond. An overarching label that has emerged for these various approaches is “ungrading” (see Blum, 2020). Perhaps needless to say, the coronavirus pandemic has led to redoubled reflections on the meaning of grades and experimentations with alternative systems, such as institution-wide pass/fail grading (Burke, 2020).

As educators and institutions continue to reimagine student evaluation, many questions arise. How can we ensure that any changes do not dampen the quality of student learning? How do grades fit into the landscape of job recruitment and career advancement, and how can we ensure changes to evaluation do not jeopardize students’ prospects?

As this research unfolds, including student perspectives is indispensable. This paper contributes to research on how students experience a shift to ungrading, addressing the research question: What is it like for students to experience a holistic and self-reflective grading system for the first time? Through a qualitative interview study using interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al., 2009) with eight college student participants, this study shows that a grade-free learning environment that centers qualitative feedback is experienced as an overwhelmingly positive shift for students. It provides time and mind space to reflect, deepening students’ learning, and it facilitates the emergence of a learning community within the classroom. While the shift does unsettle students’ habits related to extrinsic motivation and the typical student–teacher and student–student relationships, by the end of the course, ungrading has the capacity to provide a humane learning experience that helps students develop intellectual character and the kinds of skills that will serve them for decades to come.

Literature review

In the United States and many other countries, students are graded on their performance, traditionally using a tiered scale (e.g. A–F letter grades) or a numeric one (e.g. 0%–100%). According to Schneider and Hutt’s (2014) historical analysis, student evaluation began as a form of private communication between student and teacher (and parent, in the case of children) about a student’s learning and progress. But by the late 19th century, as the number of students and institutions grew, evaluation became organizational in purpose rather than pedagogical. Thus an abstract grading system was favored, as it would better facilitate moving students among institutions, ranking institutions, and so on. As grading evolved, a tradeoff was made between local context (with pedagogical aims) and portability (with organizational aims). To put it more sharply, the current grading system was devised to serve organizations rather than students (Schneider and Hutt, 2014). Today’s grading system amalgamates several functions, including ranking, sorting, rewarding, punishing, and communicating (Elbow, 1993; Kohn, 1993/2018).

Myriad concerns about the grading system have been raised over the past several decades. First, grades undermine critical thinking and meaningful learning. Researchers have found that focusing on grades and focusing on learning are inversely related (Beck et al., 1991; Harland et al., 2015; Horowitz, 2010; Milton et al., 1986). The presence of grades tends to diminish students’ interest in the subject matter (Harackiewicz et al., 1987), especially when they get a low grade (Butler, 1987); and relatedly, grades discourage students from taking intellectual risks (Condry, 1977; Milton et al., 1986; Pulfrey et al., 2011).

Second, grades provide extrinsic motivation to students, but not intrinsic motivation, which also undermines their learning. According to Kohn’s (1993/2018) analysis, extrinsic motivation is appropriate for short-term and rote tasks; but if applied to tasks requiring critical or creative thinking, extrinsic motivation leads to poor results (see also Glucksberg, 1962; Gorges et al., 2013). On the other hand, studies of students in environments without grades found that the students experienced more intrinsic motivation (Chamberlin et al., 2018; White and Fantone, 2010).

Third, grades create a transactional relationship between teacher and student, and a competitive relationship among students (Farias et al., 2010; Hayek et al., 2017), which undermines the possibilities for beneficial collaborative learning (see Laal and Ghodsi, 2012).

And fourth, grades contribute to the ongoing mental health crisis among students in higher education. Eight in 10 college students in the United States report frequent stress that negatively impacts their sleep and other health markers, and consequently their ability to learn (American Institute of Stress, 2019; Bloodgood et al., 2009). This stress can lead to mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and substance abuse (Pascoe et al., 2020); suicide is also a growing concern, as it is the second leading cause of death among college students (Aslanian and Roth, 2021). The pressure to get and maintain high grades is a leading cause of students’ stress and anxiety (Bouchrika, 2020), and research on alternative approaches to student evaluation has shown improvements in student health and wellbeing (Spring et al., 2011).

In light of these concerns, discussions on and experiments with alternatives to traditional grading are beginning to flourish. In some cases, these efforts seem to have been redoubled by the COVID-19 pandemic (Ashby-King, 2021; Goldrick-Rab, 2021; Veletsianos and Houlden, 2020), which also played a role in increasing student stress and anxiety (Aslanian and Roth, 2021; Greenberg, 2021). But even before the pandemic, several liberal arts colleges and elite institutions such as Brown University have allowed students to opt for a pass/fail rather than graded system in individual courses. Most elite medical schools use only pass/fail grades; indeed, in February 2020 it was announced that the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 would transition to pass/fail reporting in 2022; performance on this exam is one of the factors used in selecting candidates for residency programs (West et al., 2020). Similar broad-scale movements are underway in nursing (Melrose, 2017), pharmacy (Soric et al., 2019), and veterinary medicine (Frank and Sutherland-Smith, 2021).

If efforts to reform grades are meant to be in the service of students, then student perspectives on grades and reform interventions should be taken into account. As a baseline, research on students’ experiences with traditional grading has shown that the extrinsic motivation produced by grades can be helpful for getting work done, but it does not further students’ lifelong learning skills (Harland et al., 2015). Moreover, grades have been found to encourage students to avoid taking challenging courses (Chamberlin et al., 2018).

Some empirical research on student experiences of alternatives to grading has been done. For example, a comparative study of medical students in pass/fail and traditional grading systems found that the pass/fail system fostered intrinsic motivation along with myriad other benefits, such as increased collaboration among students and more time spent on extracurricular activities, all without sacrificing academic accomplishments (White and Fantone, 2010). A questionnaire study in Hong Kong found that students preferred a pass/fail system and particularly appreciated assessments that incorporated “holistic competencies” beyond just content mastery, such as critical thinking, positive values, and intellectual attitudes (Chan and Yeung, 2021). In Singapore, a similar study found that a gradeless system for first-year university students helped the students take more intellectual risks and adjust to university life (McMorran and Ragupathi, 2020). However, this study also raised the concern that in some cases students’ learning attitudes were at risk without grades being present as a form of motivation. Another study presenting mixed results was a focus group of medical students’ attitudes toward changes at their school, including a switch to a pass/fail system (Dederichs et al., 2020). While several participants appreciated the pass/fail system, others were hesitant because: receiving good grades can provide a positive incentive to do more work; grades can function as feedback as to whether students have learned enough; grades are currently necessary as a sorting mechanism for scholarships and other institutional structures (Dederichs et al., 2020). Similarly, another study of medical students showed overall positive experiences with the switch to pass/fail, yet students did voice concerns about how excellent students could stand out for residency selection without grades (Seligman et al., 2021). Still, “despite these concerns, students largely felt that, overall, the grading transition represents a positive change and, particularly surrounding wellbeing, ‘the benefits still outweigh the cons’” (Seligman et al., 2021: 321). On the issue of recognizing excellent students in the absence of grades, Jørgensen and Bråten (2019) discuss possibilities in a conceptual article. Taking all this into account, it is clear that grades cannot simply be done away with in the absence of other institutional changes. At the very least, students must be given feedback in other ways, such as through formative narrative evaluations. More broadly, evaluation tools should be developed to facilitate recognizing outstanding students and moving students across institutions in ways that do not suffer such a stark tradeoff between context and portability.

As educators and institutions reimagine student assessment, there are many possibilities and many questions. As changes are implemented, understanding student experiences is indispensable. Does the intervention achieve what it was supposed to? How might it continue to be refined? What should other instructors expect when implementing a given change? This paper contributes to research in this vein, addressing the research question: What is it like for students to experience a holistic and self-reflective grading system for the first time?

Methodology

The research question posed above, as an open question regarding processes within human experience, is best addressed with inductive qualitative research (Maxwell, 2013). More precisely, as a question about what some experience is like, it is well suited to phenomenological research (van Manen, 2014). For this study, I used interpretative phenomenological analysis, an interview-centered methodology that was developed in psychology and has been demonstrated as an effective mode of inquiry in several fields (Smith et al., 2009). The participants in this study were former students of mine who had taken multiple classes with me, both before and after I switched to a self-reflective “ungrading” model of student assessment. Institutional Review Board approval from my university was attained to conduct this research. In this section, I explain the research context as well as the methods used for the collection and analysis of empirical material.

Research context

I am an instructor at Drexel University, a large, private university in the United States, where I teach courses primarily in computer interface design and the social aspects of information technology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. I have been in this role since 2018, when I graduated with my PhD. For the first 2 years of my teaching, I used a traditional model of grading students, with the various course assignments and participation representing percentages of the final grade.

As time went on, I became uneasy with this method of student assessment. I observed that it created an adversarial relationship between me and some students, who came to me outside class to “fight” for points on assignments. I observed that sometimes students were visibly discouraged after getting a bad grade on an assignment, largely tuning out for the rest of the course. And I observed that students’ engagement with the course was test-focused rather than learning-focused. Along the way, as part of improving my teaching, I have been reading books and listening to podcasts on pedagogy. From a Teaching in Higher Ed podcast interview with Jesse Stommel, I learned about a new approach to student evaluation called “ungrading”; in Stommel’s practice, this involves cultivating students’ capacities for self-reflection and a growth mindset and ultimately inviting them to assign their own grade (with some negotiation in certain cases). I read more about Stommel’s approach in his blog posts (Stommel, 2017, 2018), and by January 2020 I was beginning to implement this approach in some of my courses. It has gone well enough that now I use this approach to ungrading in all my courses. In conversations with my students, I continue to refine the methods.

The way I have implemented ungrading is as follows. On the first day of each course, I lead a discussion with students on the meaning of grades as well as the risks and benefits of grades as outlined in the literature review above. I explain that I want to help them become interested in the material, take creative risks, and build habits conducive to lifelong learning. During the first week of term, the students set three goals for themselves; these may be more specific and individual versions of the given course learning outcomes, or they may be tangential. We discuss these goals and the students’ progress throughout the term, sometimes as a class and sometimes individually. Around the midpoint of the term, I ask students to complete a midterm self-reflection, which is an online form administered through Qualtrics, in which I ask students to share their experience of the course so far and reflect on their learning. Many of these questions are drawn from Blum’s (2020: 65–73) examples. At the end, the students are asked what letter grade they would give themselves for their work so far. Students spend on average about 45 minutes completing this form. I respond to each student’s answers with a letter sharing my own comments and observations on their work as well as their self-evaluation. In most cases, I agree with their self-grading; in some cases, I say that they are being too hard on themselves; in some cases, I say that in my eyes they haven’t yet achieved the level they think they have, and I share a few concrete changes I would like to see in the second half of the term (e.g. stronger attendance). In cases where my evaluation and the student’s self-evaluation do not match, we have a conversation. Then, at the end of the course, I ask the students to complete another self-reflection form. This one is quite similar but more summative; again, I drew from Blum’s example for many of the questions. At the end of this form, I ask the students to suggest a grade for themselves. As of January 2022, I have taught nearly 400 students using this method, all in courses of up to 35 students. In the vast majority of cases (about 98%), the grade a student suggests in their final self-reflection becomes their final grade for the course. Using this method, students have given themselves everything from a D to an A+. (Some students have failed my courses, but these students never completed these self-reflections.)

Research methods

This study followed the process of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) as described by Smith et al. (2009). As they write, IPA can be understood as phenomenological, hermeneutic and idiographic: it describes human experience, including people’s perception and meaning-making; it functions through interpretation; and it centers on individual participants’ accounts rather than preexisting theory.

In terms of methods, IPA calls for semi-structured interviews with a small group of about 3–10 participants who are relatively homogenous along the dimensions most salient to the phenomenon under study and for whom the research question will be meaningful. I conducted this study with former students of mine who (a) were enrolled in one particular section of an undergraduate information technology course in the 2020–2021 academic year and (b) who had taken at least one previous course with me. This way, participants experienced my personal style and approach to teaching both before and after my complete switch to ungrading. There were nine eligible students, and eight participated in this study. The course that all participants had in common was a 100-level course required for the information systems major but open as an elective to any student; the course was online and synchronous (at my university, all courses were online at the time due to the pandemic). Of the eight participants, six were information systems majors, one was in another area of information technology, and one was in business. Two were women and six were men. Five were seniors, two juniors, and one had graduated. Interviews were conducted in August–September 2021, with one taking place in person and the rest via Zoom; and participants were given a $20 Amazon gift card as a thank-you after their participation.

The interviews focused on the student’s experience of the grading system in the most recent course they had taken with me. I asked them to share the story of what they were thinking and feeling when I first explained how grading would work in the course, as well as how their experience evolved as the term progressed. Besides this, we discussed what grades mean for the student, how my grading system compares with others they have experienced (in my classes and in other instructors’ classes), and what improvements they would suggest to the grading system. These interviews lasted on average 40 minutes. With the permission of each participant, I recorded each of the interviews. To transcribe them, I first used an automated transcription service provided by my university and then manually corrected the transcripts.

The analysis of the empirical material proceeded in rounds of iterative open-coding. According to IPA, each interview should first be analyzed individually through multiple rounds; as I re-read and re-analyzed each interview, I abstracted and grouped the initial codes into more general themes. The initial codes were primarily comprised of words and phrases the participant used themselves, and examples of more general themes included: grades as a game, self-doubt, feeling rushed, communication, and transition. This process helped ensure that the findings were genuinely grounded in the empirical material rather than existing theory (e.g. my own reading about student evaluation). Once each interview was analyzed in this way, I compared the themes across participants with an eye toward identifying essential commonalities across all these students’ experiences. While each student’s experience was unique, there were threads of commonality that ran through all eight interviews. These threads resulted in four experiential themes, which will be discussed in the following section. To protect their anonymity, the participants were given pseudonyms: Cordelia, Regan, Edmund, Edgar, Kent, Albany, Cornwall, and Oswald.

Findings

In this study, four experiential themes were discerned: de-gamification, or unsettling the “gamified” nature of evaluation in the traditional grading system; time to think and reflect, creating space for review and the deepening of learning; rich communication, or continual feedback between teacher and student; and learning community, in which students felt like they were part of a team effort rather than siloed individuals. Each of these themes will be discussed in turn.

De-gamification

The students in this study tended to view grades as a game; consequently, they typically find ways to game the system. Ungrading short-circuited this tendency and opened up new ways of being a student. If learning has been “gamified” through grades, then ungrading is a way to de-gamify it.

In the opening question of the interview, I asked each participant to introduce themselves and their relationship to grades. Their responses showed a major focus on grades; for example, according to Oswald, grades are “the most important thing”; they are “everything” (both Kent and Albany). At this point in the interview, most of the participants mentioned striving to be a “good student.” Albany defined this term in a typical way: “Just basically following things by the book. Assignments on time, make sure you put your best effort into tests and quizzes, really following the teacher’s rules, being respectful in class. . . Sort of just, you know, a non-problem.”

Trying to be a good student in this sense within a setting where grades take center stage led to students conceptualizing learning and grades as a game. As Oswald put it, “I tried to be that perfect student—like if you observe a little bit, you can see what the professor likes, what they want to see, how can I get a good grade.” The sense that grades are a game was furthered by the technological infrastructure in place, such as our learning management system. Cordelia, “I see grades as a sort of game. . . I know that on Blackboard when it’s a specific letter grade it’s in a different color, and when I see that color. . . I focus more on the number than on the quality of my work.” Moreover, this grades-as-a-game orientation had another drawback, which Cornwall called a “one-size-fits-all approach.” Traditional grades emphasize only certain forms of expertise and do not encourage students to discover other ways of solving problems, thus dampening creativity and limiting perspective—and along the way generating stress and anxiety for students.

The switch to ungrading upended these dynamics. In some cases, this led to discomfort. For example, some students found the system to be more opaque than the traditional grading system, making it difficult to see where they stood or how they were doing because student–teacher communication did not occur in the formats and channels that students were accustomed to. Some students also had trouble understanding expectations on assignments. However, in all cases, these uncertainties were assuaged as the term progressed. This upending may have made the course more difficult for students, yet not more disagreeable. As Kent put it, “Your classes are actually very difficult for me, because there is not a test. I can just kill the test and I’ll be good. In your classes it was thinking. It was trying to figure out, use my brain a bit. I love those classes. . . It’s the classes I struggled with the most that I love the most” (Kent).

Though ungrading introduced some new difficulties for students, by and large the participants reported positive effects of shifting the emphasis away from grades. First, ungrading resulted in deeper learning. Cornwall put it this way: “It made me feel like it’s okay to be wrong. . . because you’ll learn why it’s wrong and what’s the right answer.” In contrast, in other classes he may not have felt comfortable volunteering an answer that was wrong, and nor would he have learned why it was wrong. Second, the ungrading system seemed to help students experience a deeper sense of accomplishment. Edgar said of the course, “I feel like I had more fun, and we took more risks. . . I feel if it was a graded class, people would have done a more safe bet”; likewise, Albany said, “I feel more fulfilled doing this work for sure.” The formal self-reflections may have played a role in this; as Edmund put it, “The reflection. . . made it feel like a better sense of accomplishment.”

Time to think

My university follows a quarter/trimester system, with courses lasting 10 weeks. Undergraduate students generally take four to six courses per term. The participants in my study described this system as “a rush.” The time goes by fast, and each course has a lot packed in. In contrast with the typical rhythm at our university, the students in my study experienced ungrading as providing time for reflection and space to think. As we saw above, this helped increase creative risk-taking and instill a deeper sense of accomplishment. Moreover, students experienced the assignments as more meaningful and more creative freedom in the classroom.

Not surprisingly, students came to the course with a grading orientation. As Oswald put it, when he described first hearing about the ungrading system, “To be honest, no offense, but I thought ‘Easy A.’” But even so, students quickly turned to engage with the possibilities of this new system. To quote Oswald: “But I also thought this might give me the chance to sort of relax about getting that A, and look at the material a little bit more, and try to spend more time with my teammates because I saw the class was going to be project-based.” Soon, students discovered that, without grades, they were free to focus more on the course content. Cornwall said, “The lack of grades made it a better experience. I think it just kind of made you focus more on the learning aspect and just doing the work and not even worrying about the grades.”

Without a grading orientation, the students reported having more interest in the assignments and freedom with the way they approached them. Cordelia said, “In your class, it felt more like you’re actually thinking. Like for example the Medium posts—those actually mean something because we’re posting it out onto our blog. So something that we actually care about.” Similar to Cordelia, Edgar reported that his experience in this course was different from most others he had taken: “For me it was a really great experience because I just felt like this is one of the few points in my college career that I’m working toward a very defined goal and I have the freedom to approach that goal in any way I want. So it’s that freedom and creativity aspect that’s super awesome about this.” This attitude may also stretch outside the bounds of this particular course. Kent, for example, reported that his experience with ungrading has helped him experience curiosity and possibility in other areas of his life. “There’s always a different way now, the way I look at it,” he said.

While students experienced more “time to think” in part because grades were removed, the periodic reflections obliged students to put that time to use for thinking. In this study, students’ reflection on the course material helped them digest and solidify their learning about the course concepts. But more deeply, it also gave them insight into their metacognition. Regan, for example, found herself thinking about whether and how ungrading could be implemented in other classes: “The change of the grading system had me reflect on the work I was doing in this class, and then just thinking about it in different classes, if this was incorporated, how would I have done things differently.” And for his part, Kent commented on how reflection helped him more personally: “That reflection helped me to understand myself better and helped me to understand the class a little better, too.” Oswald even reported having made self-reflection and journaling a regular part of his life practice after taking my course.

Rich communication

One of the functions of grades is communication. Many participants in this study mentioned the utility of grades to communicate with their parents and future employers. This communicative function is part of the reason the participants conceptualized grades as “everything”; in these students’ experience, grades can open or close doors for their future prospects of employments and livelihood. Thus, as Albany put it, “In most classes, it’s not like, ‘Do the best you can.’ It’s like, ‘Get an A.’” While final course grades may serve this communicative and sorting function in some contexts (as a summative evaluation), students also rely on grades as communication between teacher and student throughout the course term (as a formative evaluation). For this latter form of communication, grades do a poor job. To quote Albany again, “You can say that the numerical grade that you get on a test is your feedback. Instead of that, for a project you sent more of a unique paragraph of feedback. And I think that’s a lot more valuable than ‘85.’ That’s just a number. It means, like, ‘Do a little better,’ I guess.”

In terms of formative feedback, my approach to ungrading allowed students to experience rich communication with me on their work. Students not only appreciated the opportunity to reflect, as discussed above, but also getting my response. As Cordelia said, “After the midterm, when you gave us feedback, and actually read the grade that we deserve, it kind of verified that I’m good and you see my work.” For Regan, ungrading removed “that fear of needing to get a certain grade,” allowing her to focus less distractedly on her work in the class.

Given the rich communication available in ungrading, it is possible to represent and engage with forms of learning that would not be possible in traditional grading. For example, Edgar shared a story in his interview that for one of the class assignments, he intended to do an ambitious project:

But then, it was a day before the deadline, and I had so much stuff on my plate, so I made it a super truncated version. . . and then I submitted it. And I’m like, “Wow, I kinda F’d up here.” And then afterwards. . . I felt bad because you gave me this very glowing feedback. I felt really terrible about it. . . . So this grade agnostic system allowed me to think of more stuff that I wanted to do, but eventually when push came to shove, I submitted something I wasn’t proud of, and I kinda got rewarded for it. (Edgar)

In this case, the student faced the costs of too much ambition and perhaps procrastination in achieving his own goals for himself, and he also experienced the disconnect between his expectations for himself and my expectations for him. And he experienced guilt because of this, perhaps influencing his future behavior. These lessons of time management and negotiation are useful ones to learn as part of maturing. With ungrading, learning these lessons did not come at the cost of a grade; in a traditional grading system, on the other hand, these lessons may have been obscured by a bad grade (another punishment on top of the student’s feeling of guilt). This vignette demonstrates a risk of switching to ungrading with a low-communication feedback structure; for this style of ungrading to lead to the best student learning, there must be rich communication between teacher and student.

Community

In this course, the participants reported feeling like they were working together and learning together, and this was further facilitated by the classroom discussions and activities. Albany commented directly on the link between ungrading and learning community:

Where grades get the most frustrating is when it feels like you’re an individual in the class, and everyone’s doing their own individual thing. But in classes like yours where there’s so much participation, it feels like more of a class effort. And that makes things definitely a lot easier. When you know what everyone else is doing, there’s kind of a common goal, there’s more of a camaraderie. . . When there’s more of a community-style aspect in the class, it makes doing assignments a lot easier and a lot better and, you know, eases those stresses that most classes have. (Albany)

As Albany suggests, the classroom discussion and activities played a role in creating this community environment, but it seems that the existence of ungrading itself helped create an initial bond of trust between teacher and student. On this point, Oswald said, “If a professor’s doing something like this, that means the professor cares. . . So I don’t want to let the professor down. I want to make their time worth it.” Kent also discussed how a professor expressing interest in the material and students “makes a huge difference.”

Ungrading, as Oswald’s quote suggests, helped cultivate personal responsibility among students, and shared respect between teacher and students. Both Albany and Oswald spoke about this directly. For example, Oswald talked about how the environment of respect helped him be honest in his written self-reflections: “If I’m gonna reflect, I’m not gonna lie in my reflection. The professor ultimately has discretion, but I want to have something to write down . . . If I didn’t put in the work for the class, what would I write for my reflection?”

Finally, ungrading and the active classroom environment meant less stress for the students. Without the distraction of grades, students found themselves able to engage more fully in the class. Connecting this to learning, Albany said, “Less stress would lead to a better learning experience for sure.”

Discussion and conclusion

This study examined students’ first-time experiences with ungrading, a holistic and self-reflective grading system. The results show that students found the system to undo the gamification of learning that occurs through traditional grading, to provide time to reflect on their work and thereby deepen their learning, to enrich the communication between teacher and student during the course, and to create the foundation for a learning community within the classroom. Overall, these changes were experienced as positive and welcome interventions to improve students’ perception of their own learning and reduce anxiety in the classroom. That said, there were some hurdles students had to jump before these benefits could be fully realized; for instance, in a system where students cannot rely on grades for motivation, some struggle to find something that they can lean on.

A theme that sits in the background of the above findings is that the grading system is only one piece in a large puzzle. Our interviews focused on the grading system, yet the participants brought up: interest in the course material (both theirs and mine), freedom in coursework, life relevance of the assignments, active learning in the classroom, and getting to know their classmates. These elements were largely unchanged from when my courses used traditional grading; and recall that the participants had taken courses with me both before and after the switch. Perhaps the lack of a focus on grades made these other elements of the course experience more salient. There was also some indication from my participants that ungrading wouldn’t have been as successful without these other elements in place. Edgar said, for example, “If it was a class I wasn’t interested in, I feel like that grading system would have allowed me to phone it in.” In any case, it seems clear that all these elements contribute to a student’s learning experience in a course. As Albany put it, “Everything that you’ve done in your classes [is] a full replacement of that numerical grade. The participation, the class learning, all that stuff, the feedback—all contributes to, like I’ve been saying, the whole final product portion out of each individual.” This suggests that instructors who cannot or do not wish to switch completely to ungrading can improve the student learning experience even within the structure of a traditional grading system by attending to the emotional quality of the classroom, implementing active learning, facilitating small-group activities, and so on.

To me, the most exciting aspect of this research was hearing the students reflect upon how ungrading impacted their learning outside my courses and their views on education in general. As we saw above in the section “Time to Think,” some of the participants developed new self-understandings and reflective practices as a result of experiencing ungrading. More generally, the ungrading system provoked all students to reflect on the meaning of grades and the goals of evaluation within education. Such reflection is particularly relevant if one goal of a university education is to create a foundation for lifelong learning. Speaking of his experience with ungrading, Cornwall put it this way: “It made me think that grades shouldn’t have a huge impact on your life. We could go beyond grades.”