The Practice of Ungrading

In my first job as instructor of record, I was given a stock syllabus and told I wasn't allowed to change anything. “Why would you need to make changes?” said the course coordinator. "Everything you need is right there.” The syllabus had one blank line for me to write my name, as though the teacher for the course was irrelevant. I did make changes to that syllabus, because it felt important, from the start, for me to teach in my own voice—and for my syllabus to be written in first person. But it felt even more important for me to imagine my syllabus as a living document, one I'd be writing together with the students. My immediate anxiety about that first stock syllabus was less about whether I could make changes to the syllabus and more about whether the students could. 

In a 2020 piece for Academe, I write, 

The bureaucracies of schooling attempt to flatten our differences—reducing teachers and students to rows in a spreadsheet and our work to columns. Teachers are meant to imagine that students are interchangeable—that whether they are black, indigenous, food insecure, queer, disabled, or homeless is of no real consequence to a system (of grades, tests, and credentials) that attempts to rank them tidily against one another.

The work of ungrading is to push back on the culture of grades and quantitative assessment that reinforces hierarchies between students and teachers, while reducing both to a set of crude (often inscrutable) data points. Grades are inequitable. Ungrading inspects the inequities of schooling, asks hard questions of the structures of our schools, and offers a critique of the labor conditions for teachers at all levels of education. The affordances and limitations of assessment practices are not distributed equally, and there is a history of bias that must be consciously considered when developing assessments. Can we do assessment differently, in ways that increase access, support greater inclusion, improve learning outcomes, and enhance the experience of teaching and learning? In "Ungrading From the Margins," Riana Slyter writes, “I discovered ungrading is not merely about eliminating numerical assessments—it is about reimagining the role of assessment in education and redefining our position in the classroom.”

I have long resisted the shift in conversations about grades and ungrading toward discussion of discrete practices. The foundation of work in ungrading is a philosophical shift. For me, that shift came in my first year of teaching, influenced by the work of critical pedagogues, like Paulo Freire and bell hooks. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks writes, “To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.” A thought experiment: set this quote from hooks next to the statements in your syllabi about participation and grades, and inspect the points of friction. Ideally, our pedagogical philosophy would guide our assessment practices, rather than our assessment practices dictating our pedagogies. And, as Lisa Wells Jacobson writes, “there is no ‘right’ answer to assessment” — no stock approach to the work of ungrading. Rather, we start by recognizing that we each come to the classroom with different contexts and teach different students in different disciplines in necessarily different ways.

That first stock syllabus I was told to teach with ended up having an unfortunate influence on every syllabus I wrote afterward. As much as I'd change my policy language every time I taught, I continued to find lines from that first syllabus for years, earnestly cut and pasted. Contrast lines about participation from my 2002 Film Theory course with lines from my 2024 Horror Film course:

2002: Since this is a seminar course, which will mostly involve student-generated discussion, you have a responsibility to yourself and your classmates to show up for class—on time and prepared.

2024: In order for us to work together as a community, we all have to come prepared to participate. If you can’t finish work for any reason, chat with me (and your collaborators) in advance.

The shift might seem subtle, but the more closely I look, the more palpable it feels. In 2002, I started by reminding students of the intensity of a “seminar course,” used the second person three times (“you,” “yourself,” “your”), and I was mysteriously absent from the sentence altogether. I also added “on time and prepared” in an emphatic clause at the end followed by a menacing period. (I am certain those words are a vestige of that first stock syllabus.) In 2024, I move from the first-person plural in the first sentence (“us” and “we”) to a dialogue between the students and me in the second sentence. I emphasize “community” and end by offering an invitation. However, I find myself made uncomfortable by the still too emphatic “in advance” at the end of the sentence. It represents an important kind of boundary, but it falls too hard in the sentence, holding heavy in a way I don't mean it to. Small changes in my syllabus over the years have helped me find my way toward clear and direct communication with students, in place of the authoritarian garbage that littered the first stock syllabus I was told to teach with.

Increasingly, the syllabus has become our first interaction with students. Back in 2002, students would see the syllabus after they had met me and each other. Now, it's often the first thing they see. It's the reason my first recommendation is for us to start with “hello, how are you?,” literally or figuratively introducing ourselves to students and acknowledging the complexity of their experience. I've also tried to move away from policies and towards language that is more curious and inviting. (If my institution requires specific statements, I include them, but where I can, I revise them into the first person, reminding students what they can expect of me, even as I also convey what the institution expects of us all.)

As an aside, there is an ongoing trope that “students don’t read the syllabus,” to which I'd say, “why would they, if we haven’t written it for them?” Careful attention to how we communicate, and how we position ourselves and students in those communications, is critical. Every word of our syllabi should be written honestly (not defensively) for students as the primary audience. Especially given that stuff like syllabi, course outcomes, and assignment instructions are where so much of our communication with students happens. Bruno Guaraná writes that his course “should be taken by students as being always in flux, open to being remodeled and designed differently, to adopting different foci, and to addressing specific issues (such as nationality, Orientalism, race, gender, etc.).” The course structures the relationships we develop within it, and equity depends upon us signaling the shape of that structure from our first interactions.

I sidestepped a direct discussion of assessment in my 2002 Film Theory syllabus, “Your grade will be based on the following factors ...,” including a bunch of quantitative legalese masquerading as pedagogy. The grade was ultimately based on self-reflection, but I never used the words "self-evaluation" or "self-reflection" in the initial syllabus, focusing instead on the work they'd do. Meanwhile, in my 2024 Horror Film syllabus, I write,

Everyone who participates in our course community and completes their self-reflections will get an “A.” Instead of your grade, here’s what I want you to focus on: actively engage in the work of the course; determine what participation in our community looks like for you; reflect on your own work. I will not be grading individual assignments, but rather asking questions and making comments that engage your work rather than simply evaluate it. The intention is to help you focus on working in a more organic way, as opposed to working as you think you’re expected to. If this process causes more anxiety than it alleviates, see me at any point to confer about your work in the course to date. 

Promising everyone an “A” was a post-COVID addition to my syllabus, also inspired loosely by approaches to contract grading from Cathy N. Davis and Asao B. Inoue. My goal was to be clear with students about exactly what was expected for an “A,” while also leaving space for students to find their way to that grade for themselves (in multiple ways). Over the years, I've learned to talk very directly with students about the space I'm creating for them to discover, wonder, stumble, while also being honest about my own expectations. This requires me to be certain I don't have unexpressed expectations. When we ungrade, the worst thing we can do is to unintentionally replace visible goal posts with invisible ones. 

In that 2024 grading policy, I start by disrupting the notion that grades are competitive, a way of ranking students against one another (“everyone who participates will get an ‘A’”), I express my own hopes for the class (“I want”), I shift the active verbs into the hands of students (“engage,” “determine,” “reflect,”), and I make clear what students can expect from me. Most importantly, I explain my pedagogical reasoning (my “intention”). The part I still stumble over is the “everyone” at the outset, because it doesn't directly include me, so even as I work to unsettle hierarchy, everything about how our institutions are structured still works to reaffirm that hierarchy, even my own language. The work, though, is not to imagine that the hierarchy doesn't exist (it does), but to work together with students to dismantle it. That work starts by talking frankly about how these systems work and how the culture of grades impacts us. Every solution I've found over the years has been in listening intently to students, remaining always curious about who they are, how they learn, and what they want from their own education.

This piece is adapted from my afterword to a recent collection of essays about ungrading from the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. My work here is inspired by the thoughtful ways all the authors interrogate their own practices. In addition to the authors I've already quoted, Brianna J. Cox explores how our teaching can be informed by—and also consciously diverge from—how we ourselves were taught. Misty D. Fuller shares how she uses process documents and reflection prompts to gather important information about how her students work, but also to convey what she values as a teacher. Jean Ketterling illustrates the importance of continuous evolution, at a philosophical level, but also at a structural one. Li Cornfeld describes how students can help create the parameters for evaluating their own participation.