From Grades to Stars: Enhancing Learning in Astro 101 Through Ungrading

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This blog post is part of a special series arising from the June 2024 Education Special Session at AAS 244, Towards Equity in the Classroom: Implementing Progressive Pedagogical Practices. This session and this blog series highlight progressive pedagogical teaching practices that break from traditional lecture classroom techniques to increase student engagement, learning, and belonging across diverse groups of students. Read previous entries in this series here. In addition, the author of this blog post will be co-hosting a workshop on ungrading at the AAS summer meeting in Anchorage, 8–12 June 2025. Anyone interested in learning more about the topic and the process of implementing this novel approach in the classroom is welcome to attend.

You don't have to grade your students.

I'm not saying that you don't need to assess your students, provide ways for them to practice material, give them feedback, or give them a letter at the end of the semester that will impact everything from their scholarships to their mental health to their competitiveness on the job market. I purely mean you don't have to grade your students.

Read the other blog post

Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post for the Physics & Astronomy Faculty Teaching Institute on the harm of grades and ways to get around them. I recommend quickly reading that since this blog post won't provide such motivation. As a quick summary: grades actively harm our students and cannot possibly portray the information we so desperately want them to. Switching to ungrading will improve your students' motivation and learning!

Ungrading: you as the instructor intentionally do not assign grades

Many of us still need to assign a letter grade at the end, but there are ways to remove or mitigate the problems with grades and still assign a letter grade. The process of ungrading (it has other names, but I'm sticking with this one) can help with these issues. Here are some ungrading options you can Google or ask chatGPT for help with:

• Pass/fail course
• Minimal grading
• Resubmit until pass, do-review-redo
• Peer evaluations
• Student-generated standards
• Self-evaluation or self-grading
• Process letters or check-ins
• Standards-based grading
• Contract grading

A blog post cannot possibly cover all of the above, so I recommend the book Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead).

Switching to an ungraded class

1. Prepare yourself, mentally and emotionally. This is going to be fun, but it will be actual work and take some brain cells. Give yourself time to mull things over, and don't hesitate to reach out for help or advice! I mean that generally (ask your colleagues or your friends or even your students,) but you can also directly email me. Formulate and write down somewhere, why you want to ungrade your class. Use this statement to guide you.
2. (Re)develop your teaching philosophy:
   1. What do you want your students to take away from your class? 
   2. What assignments help your students learn best? Do they learn from reading assignments? Discussions? Homework? If your students don't seem to benefit from something, don't make them do it.
   3. Where should your students put in effort for learning and where should you put in effort for their learning? Make sure to keep a tab on your own time and sanity as those are just as important as your students' well-being and learning!
   4. How flexible do you want to be, and where can you add such flexibility? Flexibility in "correctness," deadlines, and assessment modes have all been linked to improved equitability and accessibility in classes (as long as the flexibility is structured).
   5. If you already have a class structure that you like, keep it and work around it. If you don't have one yet, pick bits that you like and keep in mind a good balance of time and effort from your students. Ideally, everything they spend time on should be helpful for their learning, and they should be compensated for this time. 
3. For each part of your course, what will you actually grade? Which assignments? Will you allow redos? Corrections?
4. For each part of your course, decide how you want to grade: a course rubric, pass/fail, peer or self-grading, self-reporting
5. Determine what will go into each grade for each part of your course: Which assignments? How complete does it have to be? How correct? Formatting? Must it be turned in on time?
6. If it is helpful for anyone:
   • My goal was to not personally assign any grades. I wanted my students to decide what they wanted to spend time on, and I wanted my students to see a direct link between their efforts and their learning (and the end grade). 
   • My grading contract requires students to pass a certain number of reading and reflection assignments on time, to earn an average mini-exam score above some threshold, and to pass a certain number of labs, homework, and projects before the end of the semester. 
   • The homework, labs, and projects are submit-until-pass, and the mini-exams are 20-minute bi-weekly assessments that include extra credit which is self-graded. I teach them how to self-grade and make them redo the grading if they are too lenient or, more likely, too harsh. 
   • I have two extra contract options for students who find themselves in a hole (either of their own making or from life being, well, life) at the end, so that they can still pass the class, and even with a B or an A if they can put in a ton of effort. 
   • Students receive the highest grade for which they complete all requirements, even if I disagree with the grade (which is rare). And no, they don't all contract for an A.

When I first heard about ungrading, I felt…betrayed. No one had told me I had to grade my students, I just thought I had to. So now you, dear reader, can't say such a thing: you don't have to grade your students.

References:

Kohn, Alfie, and Susan D. Blum. Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). West Virginia University Press, 2020.