Alternative Grading Practices

By Mandy Moore

Note from WCP Director Andy Frazee: The Writing and Communication Program encourages faculty to experiment pedagogically. Part of this experimentation may be with alternative grading practices. However, WCP does not require experimentation in these practices.

All assessment practices in the Writing and Communication Program need to account for the following:

  • Grading practices must align with Georgia Tech grading policies and guidelines as enumerated in the GT Catalog.
  • Students must fully understand the grading practice at the beginning of the semester; the practice should be described in the syllabus and explained to students.
  • Students must be able to know their standing in the course. Instructors need to be able to tell students their course grade at any point of the semester.
  • Instructors must provide feedback on course projects, even if that feedback doesn’t include a letter or numerical grade as traditionally defined.

Why grade differently?

In traditional grading practices, an instructor marks student work with a number or letter grade according to the quality of that work, measured against a supposedly objective and universal standard. However, educators have questioned the value and validity of this sort of grading for more than a century. (See, for instance, the studies conducted by Daniel Starch and Edward C. Elliott in 1912 and 1913.) There are countless issues that arise when trying to grade according to traditional numerical or letter-based standards, especially in the composition classroom, including that traditional grades may…

  • Be seen as too subjective
  • Result in negative outcomes on student learning
  • Lower student engagement
  • Emphasize a single score or letter over the process of learning and growth
  • Cannot accurately and fully represent student learning
  • Encourage students to think only about scores and GPA (extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivation for learning)
  • Perpetuate hierarchies of supremacy (in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, class, language, nationality, ability, neurotype, etc.)
  • Continue a colonial paradigm of education
  • Police student thinking, learning, and writing
  • Coerce students into performing (rather than learning) through rewards and punishment
  • Introduce and reinforce the possibility of failure as an outcome of learning (as opposed to introducing learning as a continuous process)
  • Reduce student agency
  • Create a one-sided classroom power dynamic
  • Limit students’ willingness to experiment and take risks

At Georgia Tech in particular, our students face immense pressure to achieve academic success, especially in their intensive STEM courses. Under that pressure, it can be difficult for students to engage in the iterative, collaborative, and flexible kinds of writing and communication we aim to teach in our classes because they are deeply focused on earning a good grade. Shifting to an alternative grading approach can relieve some of this pressure and create space for students to explore writing as a process rather than as a stressful and grade-oriented product.

How can we grade differently?

There are a wide range of alternative approaches to grading, which are sometimes collectively grouped under the umbrella term “ungrading.” (Some people may use “ungrading” to refer specifically to those approaches which do not place grades on assignments at all, rather than as an umbrella term.) Since there is no possible way to perfectly articulate the full complexity of a student’s learning, there is no such thing as a perfect grading system, and implementing an alternative approach requires evaluating the pros and cons specific to the institution, course, and instructor’s personal pedagogical values.

Two frameworks that can be useful in deciding what kinds of ungrading might work best for your situation come from Stephen Tchudi’s introduction to NCTE’s 1997 edited collection Alternatives to Grading Student Writing and from Asao B. Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies (2015). Tchudi discusses responding to student work in terms of “degrees of freedom,” thinking through a spectrum of approaches that offer increasing freedoms for students and instructors as they move further away from unidimensional, numerical grading. The question then becomes…

What specific sorts of freedom are you hoping to create in your classroom, both for your students and for yourself?

Freedom to take creative risks? Freedom from the linguistic dominance of a singular form of English? Freedom from assignment “feedback” that justifies a grade rather than really engaging with student work? Identifying the spaces in your course where you’d like to create more freedom can serve as a starting point for deciding how to implement an ungrading practice.

Inoue theorizes assessment practices as an ecology of interconnected elements including not only specific grading policies but also the people, places, power dynamics, learning objectives, assignments, etc. involved in the classroom. Importantly, Inoue’s framework explicitly identifies race as a fundamental and inescapable factor across all elements of an assessment ecology, one that instructors must explicitly consider in order to create fair and antiracist courses. Understanding assessment as an ecology allows us to think through how we might make any number of specific interventions in that ecology, rather than simply making one overwhelmingly unilateral decision to implement a particular grading approach. If we are making interventions in an existing ecology, we have the opportunity to experiment and engage in flexible, iterative revisions—the same opportunity we’d like to provide our students—as we explore how various changes to one or two elements can impact the entire, deeply interconnected ecology.

What interventions do you want to make in your classroom ecology to make assessment more equitable and useful for students?

In trying to answer these questions, Brittain Fellows have tried a wide range of different ungrading practices across ENGL 1101, ENGL 1102, and technical/professional communication classes. The following strategies have all been successfully employed by BFs (although these are certainly not the only possible options).

Labor-Based Grading

Some ungrading approaches evaluate the amount of labor or effort expended by students rather than the quality of their work. These approaches measure how many tasks or steps students complete (or, in some cases, the amount of time students spend on completing them). Labor-based grading can also easily be combined with contract grading, which is described below. At Georgia Tech, some BFs have implemented labor-based grading for the entire class, often by following the examples provided by Inoue in Labor-Based Grading Contracts (2019). Others have created assignment rubrics that look for effort rather than “quality,” added requirements for a certain number of drafts/revisions to demonstrate effort spent on an assignment, and/or used labor as a metric specifically for evaluating participation.

While labor-based grading can create fairness in that everyone who puts in the same amount of work earns the same grade, it can also inadvertently cause unfairness if we don’t take into account that “labor” doesn’t look the same for everyone, especially in considering factors such as disability. Inoue’s 2023 book Cripping Labor-Based Grading for More Equity in Literacy Courses offers a more in-depth discussion of how to consider disability when creating a labor-based system of assessment.

Helpful resources for/examples of labor-based grading:

Specifications (Specs) Grading

Rather than grading on quality, this approach involves giving students a checklist of the requirements—or specifications—that they need to meet in order to earn a particular grade. These “specs” operate on a yes/no or complete/incomplete system and can be created to determine grades for the course as a whole (which often looks similar to contract grading, as explained below) or to determine grades for individual assignments. BFs have taken both approaches, with some laying out the specs needed to earn a certain grade in the class and others delineating specs that represent the learning outcomes of a given assignment.

Helpful resources for/examples of specs grading:

Contract Grading

In this approach, students agree to a contract that specifies what they need to do in order to earn a certain grade for the course. Often, these contracts incorporate elements of labor-based or specifications grading; some instructors also allow for individualized contracts in which students specify their own deadlines, tasks, and consequences for failing to meet certain required elements. At Georgia Tech, BFs have created contracts that include requirements for elements such as major projects (artifacts + final portfolio), process assignments, attendance, and participation. Some BFs who utilize this approach also include opportunities (or requirements) for revision on any assignments that don’t meet the terms of the contract after the first submission.

Helpful resources for/examples of contract grading:

Self-Assessment

Rather than looking for alternate ways for instructors to assign grades, this approach asks students to assess their own work and assign grades to their own artifacts. BFs who have used this approach often spend a lot of time in class scaffolding and practicing self-assessment strategies; highly detailed and clearly articulated rubrics (building on the Common Feedback Chart, for instance) have also proved useful for BFs in helping their students understand how to assess their own work. BFs using self-assessment often require students to submit some kind of justification or rationale for their self-assigned grade (to ensure students are really engaging with the assignment goals rather than simply giving themselves an A). There’s usually also some kind of stipulation that allows instructors to intervene and change a student’s self-assigned grade if it deviates significantly from the rubric or assignment instructions.

Related: Collaborative Assessment

In some cases, it may be useful to use an approach that combines assessments from both student and teacher, rather than just using one or the other. Some BFs have, for instance, set aside a certain number of points on a project that are determined by the student’s own evaluation. Others have assigned participation grades by averaging their score with the student’s self-assessed score.

Helpful resources for/examples of self-assessment:

What advice do WCP faculty have about alternative grading?

  • You don’t have to completely overhaul your existing system in a single semester. Using alternative grading approaches, especially for the first time, can involve a lot of work up front as you set up the new procedures and materials for the class. Be realistic about the amount of time and energy you can dedicate to changing your grading policy before a new semester. It’s okay to implement partial or hybrid strategies in the meantime—which also gives you the opportunity to test out specific elements of alternative grading to see how they work in your classroom.
  • Be ready to explain your rationale for choosing an alternative grading system to students. Especially at a school like GT, where many students have had a lot of success in classrooms with more traditional grading strategies, your students may need some convincing to buy into your system. In particular, if you’re implementing a self-assessment approach or a labor-based system that requires students to keep track of their work, you’ll want to make sure they understand how your system will be beneficial to them—relieving stress and pressure, empowering them, etc.—rather than it being just another new thing for them to learn and manage on top of their workload. In general, transparency about alternative grading has proven extremely useful for BFs, following in the vein of TILT (Transparency in Learning and Teaching) best practices. When students understand the reasoning behind alternative grading approaches, they are better able to take advantage of the system to experiment in their work, reflect on their growth, and explore other ways of measuring their progress.
  • Experiment with Canvas ahead of time. Depending on the approach you take, you may need to figure out how best to translate that approach to Canvas’s Gradebook, which has some limitations in terms of accommodating alternative grading policies. Be sure to carefully walk your students through how you’re using Canvas at the beginning of the semester, especially if there are any discrepancies between how Canvas requires you to utilize numerical values and how you’re actually assigning grades.
  • Leave room for failure. There’s no such thing as a perfect grading approach because it is impossible to completely account for every aspect of every student’s learning within one system. In the same way that we ask our students to be open to the possibility of failure as a crucial and inherent part of the composition process, we also have to be open to considering the things that don’t work in our grading policies. Being transparent about this process with our students can be productive, especially when we ask for and incorporate student feedback to continue improving our approach. Letting students know that their voices and perspectives matter in our classrooms is incredibly valuable even when our attempts at alternative grading don’t go exactly as planned.
  • Use your network. Given the WCP’s educational goals, our program tends to be very supportive of alternative grading policies, and many of the faculty in our program have a wealth of knowledge and experience on implementing such policies in their own classes. Other BFs can be a great resource for thinking through what approach might be best for your class and for troubleshooting issues that might come up.

Additional Resources