You always have to grade students if you want to put them in classes where they are prepared to handle the material. Whether you call it grading, ungrading, or anything else some form of assortment relative to the class is necessary if you want every student to study material that is challenging for them.
From this it follows that the scenario where truly not grading is feasible is the one where the class has no required preparation that isn’t met by the least capable student in the cohort. Incidentally that was what I observed in general population US public secondary schools. There was no homework. In fact, there weren’t even textbooks.
How are you keeping the students accountable if they are not being graded? I'm not attempting to criticize the idea (I'm rather interested in it), but I'm curious how you deal with the student that says "I'm not being graded, so I'm not doing it."
I've seen this recently with the elementary school near me. Grading is extremely opaque, and seems to be largely based on teacher intuition. Some very advanced students have gotten grades below where they are (I've heard many teachers just won't give the highest grade until the end of the year because of the weird system).
Thankfully they also have standardized test scores, which both have a much more transparent scoring method and seem a much better match for the children's competency. It's not that standardized tests are perfect, but removing them makes things extremely capricious, and often very unfair.
I think that was the way it worked at my university too, at least officially. Unofficially, very few teachers actually graded that way, and when I saw it happen, people complained about it a lot.
Then again, the teachers that did it seemed like they were doing it punitively (e.g. subtracting the exact amount of points they were forced to add.)
I gathered from the article that basically the state of the work at the end of the semester (or whatever) is what will be graded, so students can submit work, get feedback, revise, etc.
I think I like that. The notion that education is purely transactional - put kids through school, pay X dollars, get educated kids - is not how things really work.
With this method, no one can say the kid didn't have a chance to turn in his/her best work possible.
I went to The Evergreen State College, which is the only public gradeless school I know of. Instead of grades, everyone writes narrative evaluations of themselves and their cohorts. Nearly everyone takes one fulltime multi-disciplinary course at a time.
What often ends up happening is that professors will attempt to be rigorous by tying awarded credit in a section of the class with the % of the work you turned in -- but then if they take credit, they excise the portion of the evaluation that would have described your failings.
> Of those 21 states, three said every essay is also graded by a human. But in the remaining 18 states, only a small percentage of students’ essays—it varies between 5 to 20 percent—will be randomly selected for a human grader to double check the machine’s work.
There's room for debate on whether grades should reflect homework completion and timeliness, but some of the grading practices were nuts:
"...their grades are more accurately reflecting their knowledge, not whether or not they brought in a box of Kleenex for the classroom, a factor that had influenced grades at Ellis in the past."
I applaud the effort to separate knowledge grades from "life skills" grades. I can't imagine anything more useless than making a kid repeat a class or defer their graduation when they've already acquired the requisite knowledge.
Research suggests 'honest grading' is a pipe dream anyway. The book 'A Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' dedicates most of its final chapter to grading. Even people specifically trained to grade to a very strict standard were incapable of doing so when they knew almost anything at all about the student.
> Many teachers we spoke to say they were encouraged to also follow another policy: give absent or struggling students a 50 percent on assignments they missed or didn't complete, instead of a zero. The argument was, if the student tried to make up the missed work or failed, it would most likely be impossible to pass with a zero on the books.
It sounds like the grading system is broken.
Does a zero do the thing that we want it to do?
Could there be a different metric, that doesn't weight a zero in a way that knocks students out like in an elimination tournament? What are the goals of grades? It seems like they are structured to rank students in a competition. That's great for the winners. But what do you do with the loosers?
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