Grading And Ungrading

Thu, 18 May 2023 14:12:59 -0400

Classes are done and all that's left is the grading. Grading is something I truly hate. Hating grading actually had a lot to do with my starting to build CS at Stuy (story here). I'm glad it's my last grading rodeo but even as I work through assignments for the final time after 33 years I still have many questions about the best way to do it.

Should we give tests or be project based? What about deadlines? Work alone or in a group? Should students be able to update solutions after getting back an initial grade? How many assessments? And of course, how important are grades anyway.

A recent trend has been to move to ungrading or it's relative specification grading. There are many more variants and names but the idea, described here in terms of a programming assignment for convenience, is that a student project must check off certain things - to be awarded an A grade. The student can update the project over time and often resubmit it after an initial grading. If a student checks off enough items on enough assignments, they get an A for the term.

As a coarse example, in my algorithms class, I gave 8 assignments. If I said that any student that completes 4 out of 5 of the "deliverables" for each assignment they get an A. Alternatively if the get 5 out of 5 on, let's say 5 assignments and 3 out of 5 on the other two they can also get an A. Then variations ensue.

I'm not actually doing that this semester. I have 8 projects, each has a hard deadline that can be extended upon request. Each gets a holistic grade and then I do a hard average. The vast majority of my students will be getting an A or A- as a result with most earning an A.

Now, I like the idea of ungrading but I have some real concerns. First though, we have to discuss why grades are, or are not important.

In many classes, truth be told, they aren't important. I'd argue that this is true for most advanced CS classes and CS electives. Companies might use GPA as a first cut for interviews but really most look at resumes and a student transcript is not what's used but rather the technical interview, which is flawed in its own ways. I guess grad school might care more about specific class grades but that's really a very small minority of students and so is the tail wagging the dog.

Grades can be important as a baseline of information in classes though that have follow ups. If a student got an A or a B in data structures it can inform the algorithms teacher about what to expect from those students vs a student who squeaked by with a C. On the other hand, do college instructors actually look at that information?

At the high school level, teachers will and it can be useful. Not as useful as what often happens when teachers have time together and can compare notes. I used to trade class lists with colleagues and we'd share info. We were all perceptive enough to know that the previous teacher might have some biases so we wouldn't hold anything against a student but it was helpful to know where kids had challenges and what were some tendencies. Grades can do that a little but discussion works better.

I didn't know where I'd end up when I started writing this but from the importance of grades side, I'm thinking they're not very important in the greater scheme of things other than pass/fail with the idea that pass means you know what you need to know for the next course.

At Stuy, grades were 55, 65 to 90 in increments of 5 then 90 to 100 and culturally grades were very important. For our AP classes and higher in CS I'd always say that we want to reward a student who's trying to do and learn more so be generous with grades. In our intro class, the feeder to our AP and advanced classes, I'd say to my teachers "if you award under a 90 you're saying that the student will struggle in our APCS class. If you award a 90 - 95 you're saying the student will do well and if you award 95 or above, the student will breeze through the class." That was the purpose of grades so a year later when the teacher was unavailable we could still assess the kid for placement.

So, one can be lose with grades and take away a fair amount of pressure but there are other issues with ungrading.

One issue involves deadlines. I like the idea of ungrading but I also think that deadlines are important. While frequently people opposed to deadlines will say they're not really important - real world projects are frequently delivered late, there are plenty of times where deadlines are real - try getting to your plane after they close the boarding gate. Doc says come back in 6 months to check that thing and you don't for 18, you might be in trouble. Miss that college application deadline and you're probably SOL. Some deadlines are flexible. Many are not and in any event, I want my former students to be the ones who deliver on time. Open deadlines are also bad for students who need more structure. Instructors who favor unlimited assignment submission and re submission are only catering to students who thrive under those circumstances. Also, students who would benefit from deadlines can also fall behind and experience a snoball effect in cumulative classes - this is not good. Finally, not having deadlines results in a massive workload increase on teachers.

At the end of the day, deadlines aren't bad and can be good and important but you need to be reasonable and flexible. I talk about what I do here and here.

Another issue with ungrading. and this might be specific to CS and programming classes is that when students can complete things any time in any way they might not really learn what they have to learn (with of course, the ultimate bad end of this being outright cheating). This happened with a small number of teachers in my program. As professionals, they were left to do certain things on their own for prework and we followed very open deadlines and specification grading for our summer courses. Some students benefited from this, others were take it or leave it, there were a few, though, who were able to finish what had to be finished but since it was as flexible as it was, and through the program they saw more code samples, similar code samples, etc., at the end of the day they completed what they needed to complete but didn't really learn what we wanted them to learn.

In reality, this wasn't a huge deal for my program (although one or two teachers actively took advantage of the lose policy and while it helped some legitimately and I'm glad for that, it pisses me off when people take advantage) since the CS we cover is far and away more than the teachers will need but it still didn't sit well with me. I wasn't going to change policy for the summer session mid stream but it ended up not giving them as much as it should have.

I know other places are trying to implement versions of ungrading and I'm guessing they're also seeing mixed results if they track students to later classes. Unfortunately, all the experiments I know of are in "elite" institutions. I'd be curious if anyone's trying anything in a mid-performing public high school or mid tier (perception wise) college.

So, now that I've avoided grading for the duration of this post, I should probably get back to work and finish looking at those last sets of assignment.

grading on C'est la Z

Grading And Ungrading