The way that we grade is so loaded with assumptions about our students, and therefore is not helpful to them in most cases. Teachers are almost stenographers in the shorthand of grades, grading, marking. They don't really have any facility with that language necessary ly. And they also don't have any control or command over that language. When we reduce these complex interactions into things like o or a slash a minus, or a minus slash b plus or upper third, all of these strange demarcations thatreally don't facilitate the communication to feedback that we're trying to have.
Jesse Stommel shares about how to ungrade on episode 217 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.
Quotes from the episode
The worst rubrics don’t create space for surprise or discovery.
—Jesse Stommel
Asking [students] to evaluate themselves ends up being a really important learning experience.
—Jesse Stommel
Something as complicated as learning can’t be reduced to … rows in a spreadsheet.
—Jesse Stommel
Just taking the grade off the table doesn’t do the harder work of demystifying that culture we’ve created in education.
—Jesse Stommel