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Higher Listenings
A lively look at the trends and people shaping the future of higher education, featuring thought leaders from across the industry. Brought to you by Top Hat.
Higher Listenings
Why We Grade and How to Stop It with Jesse Stommel
Is grading doing us or our students any favors? Or do grades short circuit the rich, messy human interactions that are so important to meaningful learning? For Jesse Stommel, author of Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade and How to Stop, breaking our addiction to grades may be easier than you think. Jesse shares why he’s never put a grade on student work and why ‘ungrading’ might be the just the thing we need to move beyond the transactional to get students invested in learning.
00:00: Rethinking Grades in Higher Education
10:35: Moving Towards Ungrading
19:25: The Impact of AI
23:56: Risks in Education Promotion
28:55: Transforming Assessments
40:29: Enhancing Student Engagement
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Welcome to Higher Listenings, a podcast from your friends at Top Hat, offering a lively look at the trends and people shaping the future of higher education. I'm Eric Gardner, Director of Educational Programming.
Speaker 2:And I'm Brad Cohen, Chief Academic Officer.
Speaker 1:AI seems to be stealing the spotlight in higher education these days. It reminds me a bit of playing gigs at the local pub, you know, working on our craft, finding the right songs, building a following, and then Taylor Swift rolls into town and all of a sudden, it's nothing but Taylor Swift. Well, there's good news here. Just maybe not so much from my band, but where higher education is concerned, whatever your feelings about AI, it is at least pushing us to have conversations about things we really need to be talking about, like equity and engagement and motivating students to do hard things. Or, if you're educator and author, jesse Stommel, grading. Like. What do grades actually mean anyway? Are they doing us or our students any favours? And, most importantly, is our focus on grades short-circuiting the rich, messy human interactions that are so important to meaningful learning? Well, we're going to get to all that, perhaps with the exception of Taylor Swift. That's for another episode.
Speaker 1:So, if you happen to be marking, set aside that stack of papers. They're not going anywhere. Instead, grab a snack and get comfortable as we explore Jesse Stommel's latest book Undoing the Grade why we Grade and how to Stop. Welcome to Higher Listenings. It's great to have you with us. Yeah, it's good to see you both. So I know that you host faculty workshops and you often start the conversation with a couple of questions, so I wanted to turn the tables and put these to you. So first, how does it feel to grade and how does it feel for you to be graded?
Speaker 3:You know, honestly, I would say that grading is probably the most painful thing that I've ever done in my life At least the most painful professional thing that I've ever done in my life At least the most painful professional thing that I've ever done in my life.
Speaker 3:So I was a grader for a 100 level course and I remember having a stack of 80 papers that I was having to grade and put comments on, and I remember doing all kinds of things to get through this horrible, this horrible experience and I'm like soul, like soul sucking experience, because with every single time I would be writing comments and putting a grade, it felt like an existential crisis, felt like I was saying something about who these people were, something about who I was. So absolutely not fun at all. And I think from that experience I really realized how much it distracted from the real thing I wanted to be doing, which was making connection with these students and helping them with their writing and helping them think about filmed I heard one person characterize receiving a letter grade as the equivalent of a Yelp review for your own sense of self-esteem.
Speaker 1:So when it's good you get that little dopamine hit, but when it's not, you start to question your place in the universe.
Speaker 3:It's always ourselves that are being graded. That's always where the emotion comes from. No one is ever disappointed at the paper that they got to be on. They always feel some sense of disappointment in themselves. No one feels like joy emanating from the work. They feel joy emanating from themselves. I have been declared an A student. Not.
Speaker 2:This has been declared an A paper. Jesse, I'm totally with you. You know, for me the grading was the most painful part of my professional life. It just felt like I was kind of switching my relationship in a very deep and unpleasant way with my students, on the one hand, spending so much energy and thought trying to develop them and help them develop, and on the other, just standing there slapping down you know, some judgment that was often baffling to them. It seems to me that this is a very deep passion of yours, very personal, and some of that actually comes through in the book. So I want to ask you was there a moment or was there a set of experiences that really motivated you to pursue this as a focus of your work as an instructor, as a father, as a student, when you thought, look, this is wrong and it needs to stop?
Speaker 3:I haven't put a grade on a piece of student work ever as instructor of record. I've only done it when I was a grader for a course, which means I've had a good amount of experience piles and piles of papers that I was working through as a grader. So it's a little bit of an irony or a paradox that the guy who's never put a grade on a piece of student work has decided to devote his life to research and grades and assessment. I hate grades. Why would I want to spend my life talking about them?
Speaker 3:Grades were the elephant in the room of every conversation that was underway in education and I felt like, well, like what's the barrier to us doing the work that we need to do? What's keeping us from building successful relationships with students? And I'm talking about thousands of conversations I had with teachers where grades always came up. Even if we were trying to not talk about them, we ended up talking about them, and so really for me it was. You know, I want us to do this important work of teaching teachers, collaborating, building relationships with students, and I think the only way that we can do it right now is to knock down the biggest barrier, which is grades and really the culture of grades at our institutions, really the culture of grades at our institutions.
Speaker 2:So you've never given a grade on a paper, you said. Have you never been compelled to submit final grades as part of a system?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the interesting complexity is that I've never put a grade on a piece of student work, but I've always been asked to give students a final grade, and so that's the kind of conundrum that I've had to deal with at so many different institutions.
Speaker 3:I mean, at one point I was teaching nine classes at four different institutions as a road warrior adjunct and having to deal with the rules at all of those different institutions. And I mean to give you the really short version ultimately for me. I've been at institutions that said I had to give a final grade. They didn't tell me how I had to determine that final grade, and none of them none of them gave me any really strict rules about how that final grade was determined. And that isn't to say that no institutions do that. Some people find themselves at institutions where there are a lot of restrictions, but I often find that that's not, that that's not the case Really. We internalize more restrictions than are actually there, and so what I've decided to do is make students partners with me in that process. So, ultimately, the grade that's going on their transcript is a grade that they've determined themselves, with my help and support terminology.
Speaker 1:So as terms go and I've seen this was came up a number of times in the book that ungrading is. It's a bit unwieldy and I know that you've wrestled with this, so I actually asked AI for some help in coming up with a few options for you, jesse. So here goes letterless learning, which I think has at least some nice alliteration to it Assessment free adventure. Assessment-free adventure Not bad. My favorite, the Grade Escape. So I'm wondering if any of these grab you. Do you see a possible contender for your next book?
Speaker 3:No, unfortunately Although.
Speaker 1:The Grade.
Speaker 3:Escape sounds like a really wonderful one, and to me the thing that the word ungrading does is it forces us to kind of stumble over it and pause and go. What? And that's the work that I want people to do. I want people to be inspecting grades as a system, as a structure. What are these things? Why do we have them, who are they for, how do they make us feel?
Speaker 3:And that, to me, the word ungrading is a problematic term. But I think it's a problematic term in just the right words ways, because it's not easy and I guess the other thing is to be clear that there's different words do different things for different audiences. Ungrading feels like a word that we use as educators to talk about the weirdness and absurdity of what it is that we're doing in our practice. I don't necessarily use the word as often with students because there's a different set of conversations I want to have with students. Certainly, some of it's about the absurdity of their experience of being graded, but people often assume that I'm going into class and talking with my students about ungrading. I'm going into my class and talking to students about all manner of things our lives, their life, how it feels to be graded but not necessarily going in and having a meta-level conversation about grades as a system necessarily going in and having a meta-level conversation about grades as a system.
Speaker 2:I love the ungrading point you're making here. It feels so deeply ingrained in our practice as educators, like from the very first days of training, that it is a process to unwind, to kind of figure a way forward that doesn't have that so bound up in the practice of assessment. So yeah, I think it's really important to recognize early that if you're going to start down this journey you've got to think about really deeply the practice that you're going to undertake and how you're going to get there.
Speaker 1:Speaking of practice, let's give folks a flavor of what this looks like. So maybe you could take us through ungrading light versus the full strength premium version of ungrading and give us a sense.
Speaker 3:There's no ungrading light. You have to do everything, you have to spend 50 hours researching this and, in fact, there's a whole course that I'm selling on my website exactly about this. Actually, totally kidding, that's not true. The truth is, I don't even know if there is an ungrading light, because the first question is the most important question, which is what are grades, why do we grade? And that, ultimately, just having that conversation with yourself, with your colleagues and, ideally and most importantly, with your students, is the first step. And if you do nothing else, if you change nothing else about your practice, but you go in and have a 30 minute conversation with your students about grades and questions like how do grades impact your learning, what do grades do for you as a student, how do they motivate you, how do they demotivate you? So just that 30 minute conversation is the most important piece of the work, and then I think everything else flows from there, because the second, we're having those conversations with our students. We're breaking down a whole bunch of the hierarchies and the weird stuff that happens.
Speaker 3:We were talking earlier about the stack of grades and how it feels to grade students. You know what feels even worse when you've had this interesting relationships with students and you grade that first stack of papers and you hand it back to them. The weird hum in the room after that day, the weird thing that happens in the relationship between you and students. The second, we pull the rug out from under them and say, no, I wasn't really trying to build a human relationship with you, I was actually just doing that, you know, as a ruse. What really matters here is that grade that I just put on that paper and so ultimately, like finding ways to break that down is as much about like stopping grading or grading less as it is about having those conversations with students, those frank conversations.
Speaker 2:I was speaking with a biology professor who had a grading system that had two decimal points precision in his grading scheme and he realized one day when he was doing his marking there is nothing that meaningfully is represented in student learning by a 0.06 versus a 0.08. And that made the difference in students actually being able to advance in a program. So he began to really unpack that and move toward an ungrading practice. Can you make the case? Why should we give up traditional grading? So relationships is one, this kind of precision, absurdity is another. Are there other justifications for really moving away from this standard practice?
Speaker 3:I think there's a couple and you've pointed out. You've pointed to one of them, which is what are grades for? Are grades for evaluating students, are they for communicating to students about their learning, or are grades for ranking students against one another? I personally think that that's the worst approach to education and that's the worst approach to structuring our evaluation systems. If we agree that we're evaluating and communicating, grades are a terrible way to do that. You've pointed to one of the ways that they're terrible. I give you a 92, I give Eric a 93, what's the difference between those grades? But there would be no way that I could express what that meant. There'd be no tangible way for me to say, well, a 93 means X, a 92 means Y. So that, to me, is one of the things they fail to communicate and they fail to effectively evaluate students.
Speaker 3:The other piece, I think, is the equity piece. Ultimately, they not only fail to communicate or fail to evaluate, they do that in a very specific way. They do that in a way that benefits people who are already benefited by the systems that we're working within. They do that so much research that shows how biased grades are, and in so many different ways. So, ultimately, those are the two things, and I think that the latter one is even more concerning to me. They fail to communicate, fail to evaluate, but do that to very specific populations of students to a much greater degree. And to be clear we're talking about black students, we're talking about Black students, we're talking about queer students, we're talking about female students, we're talking about first-generation students. We're talking about disabled students being even more negatively affected by the system of grades that we work with under I'm going to play devil's advocate here a little bit.
Speaker 1:I hope you're ready, jesse. So on the one hand it seems like ungrading is having a moment, like we're seeing a lot more interest, I think, in this particular topic and approach. Yet we're also starting to see a bit of a backlash potentially brewing against student centeredness and the fact that faculty they're getting burned out and there's been a lot of judgment level that the way you know instructors actually teach and sort of insinuations that whatever an instructor does in some form or fashion is creating trauma of one kind or another. And now, adding ungrading to the mix, is there a risk here that we're only adding more fuel to the fire and and overwhelming faculty in the end?
Speaker 3:I think that's if we want it to be neat and tidy and easy. I mean, I think, play devil's advocate against ungrading, because that's what it needs. It needs to both ask hard questions about grades, but it also needs to ask hard questions about itself. So, truthfully, any of the pushback is useful and good, as long as we're doing it with similar goals. Do we want students to learn more? Do we want students to have better experiences in college? Students to learn more? Do we want students to have better experiences in college? Do we want students to not encounter as much bias as they might otherwise encounter? So if our goals are shared like that, then asking hard questions is going to be useful, no matter what. So let's start there and then see where we end up.
Speaker 3:The thing I would say is that you brought up like the sense that everything might cause them trauma. I sometimes get a question well, won't ungrading cause a bunch of anxiety? Well, yes, it'll cause anxiety. If students are worried about a rug getting pulled out from under them, we have to ask it what is it that is causing students anxiety? It's not grades, it's not ungrading, it's not the rubric, it's not the policy. It's a fear that their teachers aren't going to treat them like human beings. And so if students feel like they're being treated like human beings, if they're being talked to frankly, they're being invited to discussion, if they're being listened to, if we're expressing compassion for them, if we're not pulling rugs out from under them, they aren't going to experience that anxiety, at least to a degree that's debilitating to them. A little bit of anxiousness is actually good for us as students. There's a lot of research about cortisol levels. I don't want to get too far talking about cortisol levels, but a little cortisol actually creates a good environment for learning.
Speaker 1:What we need is for people not to feel fear, I think I was just talking to Sarah Rose Kavanaugh actually about this the other day. And on the anxiety front, it's debilitating when you don't feel like you've got the tools, the resources, et cetera in order to address the root cause. But if you feel like, yeah, I'm feeling anxious, but I've got some of the resources, the insights, the support to sort of navigate this, then that is a motivating or a potentially a motivating factor in the learning experience or doing something a bit differently.
Speaker 3:If students feel like their teacher cares about them, they're less likely to cheat. So ultimately it comes down to those two things Don't throw too much anxiety, express compassion. And there's a real sweet spot for students to be able to experiment and to be able to deal with sort of hard, challenging, you know, learning experiences.
Speaker 2:I feel compelled to say Vygotsky's zone of proximal development. Nice, brad, that's what we're talking about here. I actually think maybe, contrary to Eric's question, we're actually in a moment of perhaps blossoming alt grading movement. I don't know if you feel that way, jesse, but I've been in a number of conversations where people I wouldn't expect to carry this conversation forward are talking about this. So do you think that's true? Do you think it's? Do you sense that there's a growing movement? And, if so, what's behind that?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, I think that I have been having these conversations since 2005 and something happened right around 2017 where the conversation exploded. I wrote a blog post in 2017 and this wasn't my expectation. It was a relatively simple um, you know, simple blog post about my own experience and my own feelings. It was called why I Don't Grade, and it ended up with 55,000 views and was the most, one of the most read blog posts I'd ever written, and so it was clear that it was dropped. It wasn't my blog post that did anything. It was.
Speaker 3:It was dropped into an environment that was desperate for that conversation, and I think desperate because we've seen the way that. You know, I love data, I love evidence, I love research, but there's a way in which we've kind of turned students into data points and we've turned so many of the things that are institutions into just a set of data points and we've kind of forgotten the human relationships at the core of education, and I think that's what folks were responding to, where they were seeing grades as one of the biggest sort of pressure points in that, that sort of dehumanization of the educational experience, higher listenings on Apple, spotify or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
Speaker 1:You can also write us a review. We'd love to hear your thoughts or invite a friend. And last, most important of all, thanks for listening Back to the show. You know AI burst onto the scene whatever a year and a half or so ago and that upended a lot of the traditional practices around assignments and assessments for faculty. So is AI accelerating interest in ungrading?
Speaker 3:I don't know. I would almost say AI is distracting from every other conversation that we're having in education, because it imagines it's a separate conversation. It imagines there is a conversation about AI that is not embedded in all of these other conversations. Anytime I'm talking about AI, I suddenly want to talk about the learning management system and I want to talk about grades, and I want to talk about equity and I want to talk about trauma, because, ultimately, the conversations about AI are really all of those conversations, and so I'm not saying that I don't like the conversations about AI. What I don't love is this imagining that it's a separate conversation, that it isn't pushing us to have conversations we already needed to have, that we already should be having. I think, ultimately, if I was going to say, well, what's the solution to the problem of AI, it's well, we need to talk about what education is for and we need to talk about why do we assess? What are we trying to achieve with assessment? Why is cheating happening, not how much cheating is happening.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that you take that response to Eric's question. I just got back from a conference that was all about AI in education and that theme was kind of pervasive in the conference conversation. In your book you emphasize and we talked about this in the conversation already an orientation toward care, empathy and trust you know, foundations of relationships essentially, and that was a part of the conversation in the AI conference as well. Why is this so important to learning and how does traditional grading break it?
Speaker 3:I mean, ultimately, I think it's because that's how humans work, to some degree, I mean, at least, when we're working well, we develop relationships, we get to know people, we share things about ourselves, we act vulnerably, we set boundaries, we do all of these things that are very sort of deeply, deeply human.
Speaker 3:And I think what happens is that a lot of the approaches to grades actually short circuit some of that work. Imagine if, just before this conversation between the three of us, I pulled up out a rubric and I said well, here's the things we're going to have to do in this conversation and I'm going to expect each of you to say one thing and then reply to two things, and then, when we're done with that, I'm going to evaluate you on this metric and I'm going to give you each a score. To what degree is that actually facilitating a genuine conversation or relationship or interaction between any of us? I think that that's really the problem of grades is that they frustrate all of the social contracts and all of the human interactions that we might otherwise have. At their worst Not to say that, you know, at their best they can find ways to not do that, but at their worst, that's what they do.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm glad you're not doing that to us, Jesse, just because we're both a little bit new to this whole podcasting thing.
Speaker 3:Don't worry, I'm grading you as we're doing.
Speaker 2:I've got a little thing, I'm putting alleys and check marks.
Speaker 1:And I'm out. Yeah, I'll write a reflection piece after and I'll send that to you, okay? Speaking of which you know traditional assessments or culminating assignments are, I think they serve in many ways as a forcing mechanism to get students to actually do the work, and I think there's an assumption that if students aren't challenged to demonstrate their learning, they're just not going to put in the effort, and it's not exactly a strong vote of confidence in students being deeply committed to their own learning. Yet you've reviewed, I think it's, thousands of self-reflections and self-evaluations from your students. So how has that maybe affected your perspective on that?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, if we just think about, like, if I said to you, eric, if I said, if you do these seven things, you'll get an A, or if I said to you, hey, eric, I'm really curious how you would respond to this prompt. I'm just deeply interested. I want you to give you a space to just play and I want you not to worry about failure. I want you to just try something. If it doesn't work, try a different thing. So imagine me telling you those two different things which of those things is more likely to get you to do a bunch of hard work and which of them is less likely to get you to do hard work? I think you're a lot more likely to do deep reflection, hard work, given the second prompt, as opposed to the do the seven things, you get an a. Do the seven things, you get an a. Ultimately, what you end up doing is just performing something. For me, you might perform it really really well. In fact, I bet you, I bet you will, um. But the other sort of asks you to do, I think, something much harder. It asks you to take a risk, and this is what I hear back from students.
Speaker 3:I hear back from students, things like and I mentioned this quote in the book because it still resonates with me so much student evaluation. The student writes to me, um, on the evaluation. They say this was the hardest class I ever took in my life. It was an easy a. Those two sentences right next to one another is like absolutely marvelous to me, because it's exactly what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to create the space for students to really push themselves, but also never to let them feel like a rug is going to get pulled out from under them, because I think those two things go hand in hand it's a bit like flow in a way, too right, there's a challenge there, but there's some space to explore, to be creative rather than, like you say, a checklist.
Speaker 1:That is probably not so conducive to achieving a state of flow in terms of the learning experience.
Speaker 3:If students feel comfortable and they feel safe and they feel like you've set boundaries and they feel like you've given them a lot of room to play and they're not afraid and they're not worried a rug is going to get pulled out from under them, you can actually challenge them so much more directly. You can say to them you can push them in ways that you couldn't otherwise, because, ultimately, fear is the worst thing that you can instill in them. If you're trying to create learning and students can feel challenged by me without feeling fear, so I feel like I'm able to ask more of my students because of my approach, not asking less of them to ask more of my students because of my approach, not asking less of them.
Speaker 2:You've talked about the problem of precarity in higher education under quite a different number of circumstances, obviously, adjunct faculty being a prime example of that. Ungrading seems to be one of these decisions that creates risk. It is bucking the system of these decisions that creates risk. It is bucking the system. It is calling out, in some ways, a deeply ingrained set of practices that others might not be ready to abandon or to challenge. So what do you say to people who might be open to this or who, in fact, maybe want to go in this direction, but they don't feel like they have the time or their freedom or their protection go in this direction, but they don't feel like they have the time or their freedom or their protection, frankly, to pursue this that a tenured professor might have?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mentioned earlier. This is kind of a bit of a side note, but I mentioned earlier that the culture of grades negatively affects marginalized students more. I also think it negatively affects marginalized faculty and teachers and staff more, because we're all being created in various different ways too and we're all being asked to do different kinds of work, and anytime we reduce the work to sort of the mechanization of labor, I mean that falls on marginalized people more. And when we're talking about something like adjuncts, you know the position that adjuncts are put in when they're teaching nine classes at four different institutions and have to navigate all of these systems and structures. That's not a good system. So ultimately they're both negatively affected by it and they're disincentivized from pushing back on it.
Speaker 3:When I was an adjunct, I in some ways I asked for forgiveness rather than asking for permission.
Speaker 3:I presumed that they were hiring me to do a job and I did the job the way that I felt was right for me to do it.
Speaker 3:One of the things I, whenever I'm working with adjuncts, one of the first things I say is let's open your institution's page where it says exactly what the requirements are for you when it comes to grades.
Speaker 3:Let's look at that email from your chair where it says exactly what the requirements are for you when it comes to grades.
Speaker 3:Let's look at that email from your chair where it says exactly what you have to do, what you can't do, what you can do. Let's look at that really carefully, because let's know the rules before we decide to break them, and let's also know where there aren't rules or restrictions, where we are given room and latitude to move. And the other thing I would say is that there are people you can point to and say well, wait, there's this published literature that says X, y, z, and so you can have data behind you when you're making these decisions about alternative assessment. And so if I were you know, if I were an adjunct today, I would have that data right at my fingertips so that when my chair wrote to me, I had something to write back. And so kind of giving them the fuel that they need to do that kind of pushback, I think, is part of the work that we have to do if we have any power or any kind of place of authority in education.
Speaker 1:So how do you recommend instructors begin testing waters Like? What questions should they be asking themselves first if they want to go down this path?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think that it can be as basic as starting by looking at your syllabus and looking at the kind of language that you're using when you're talking to students. I think one of the first things we have to do is, if we want students to read them, we to actually write them for students, which I don't think is the case. I mean, people complain about my students didn't read the syllabus, and then I ask myself internally I don't ask them directly. I said, well, did you write it for them? Like is, was that your audience when you wrote it? And I think that most of us would find that when we read our syllabi and I think I would still find lines in mind to this day that are failing to do what I'm exactly advising right now, which is read it from the perspective of your students.
Speaker 3:To what degree are you communicating to and with your students in that document? How many yous are you using? How many I's are you using? How many we's are we using? What kinds of jargon are you using in it? To what extent are you actually acknowledging that students exist and have complicated lives that they have to deal with? And so that's the first thing I would do is just say like how are hierarchies being created right from the outset? How are you setting hierarchies up in your class right from the very first moment that basically communicate to students? I'm here to evaluate you. You're here to perform your success to me so that I can evaluate you Again. I think a lot of us would look around at the shape of our classrooms, the shape of the learning management system, the statements on our syllabus and notice lots of moments where we're signaling to students that that's what we're doing that that's what we're doing.
Speaker 2:Well, ungrading for me would have been very comfortable in the small seminar upper level graduate philosophy courses that I taught. It's hard to imagine making that work in a lecture hall for a required gen ed course with three or 400 students. Do you have some advice on how, in that that kind of context, ungrading might unfold?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I guess what I would say is that I think in some ways it might be harder in certain ways, but it's even more necessary, because when you have 150 students as a teacher at the front, you can't really successfully evaluate their learning. You definitely can't do it through Scantron tests. I mean, I don't necessarily think tests are bad in and of themselves, but I don't think testing alone can successfully evaluate students. You can't be inside of the heads of 150 students. And so what I think is that when we have 150 students, or you know, a thousand students, it becomes even more necessary to hear their voices, to sort of get inside of their heads, to understand what their learning looks like. And that means having them write about their own learning and that means having them do things like meta-reflection. So it becomes even more necessary for them to be engaged in the assessment process, for us to do it successfully.
Speaker 3:And people immediately worry well, wait, if I get a thousand self-reflections, do I have to respond to every one of those? Well, no, you don't have to. In fact, that impulse that we feel sort of leans right back into the transactional relationship of teaching. Every bit of work that students do the teacher must respond to in order to reassert our dominance and our place as evaluators in the relationship with them. No, I get a thousand letters and I might write one letter back to the entire class that says here's what I noticed, here's what I'm seeing, here's what I saw you saying and asking questions, probing questions, here's what I'd like to leave you thinking about, here's what I'd like to talk more about together with you, those kinds of things. And then I might write 10 individual letters to 10 students who brought up very specific things or even set up meetings with them. So to me, I think it becomes even more important to bring them into the process.
Speaker 1:What about STEM disciplines Like that's? That seems to be a tricky animal. There's a lot less nuance, say, in engineering or health sciences than there is in philosophy or 20th century British poetry, and there's external pressures there as well, right, like accreditations and board exams that need to be written. What would you offer instructors in those fields who have a responsibility to ensure students meet a certain bar?
Speaker 3:I mean I think I would push back on you a little bit and say my husband, who's an engineer, would take issue with your saying there's less nuance there, or less space for imagination, or less space for compassion or less space for asking hard questions. I think fundamental to the sciences is this notion of asking questions that we don't yet know the answer to. So I think we have that in common that all of these disciplines are often saying asking questions that we don't yet have the answer to. But I do also take your point that different disciplines function differently and we need to also acknowledge that. So, thinking about what we have in common but also thinking about what's different, what I would say is that I don't teach in the sciences, I don't teach in engineering, but the science and engineering faculty that I've talked to, who have started to use project-based learning, alternative approaches to assessment, ungrading, tell me that it has an even bigger benefit in their disciplines because it kind of pushes them and students further out of a comfort zone that they've been really asked to work inside of. That, essentially, you will regurgitate these things on a test. You will take these things in very transactional again, take this information in and then regurgitate it onto a test that, inside of those disciplines, things like project-based learning has an even more profound effect on their work and it resembles the work that they're going to do in the world.
Speaker 3:My husband as an engineer, it's all project-based learning. Once he gets into the field, nursing, it's all project-based learning. It's all human interaction and compassion Doctors, lawyers, very, very complicated human-to-human work that they're doing. And so ultimately, I think we do ourselves a disservice when we kind of neat and tidily put disciplines into buckets.
Speaker 2:I wonder if there is, in the STEM disciplines in particular, this greater issue of external pressure, not just accreditation that Eric mentioned, but ultimately these students have to take very high stakes standardized tests and I've heard from faculty directly who feel like this kind of practice undermines the cultivation of a certain set of skills and resilience and strength. I suppose in the moment to rise above your own anxiety and perform that it deprives them of that experience of preparing for what eventually does stand between them and their future.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that that's a it's a good point to basically kind of again step back and push on ungrading to say we can't imagine that there's this utopian world that exists where students don't have to apply to graduate students, they don't have to take licensure exams, they don't have to apply to law school, they don't have to have a transcript that they can submit when they're, you know, applying to grad school and so kind of just to recognize that we can't. We can't imagine in our little classroom that there's this ideal world that doesn't isn't connected to all of these other things. The one thing I would say about, like, let's take nursing, for example.
Speaker 3:I ended up I ended up working with a lot of nurses because you have this discipline that's all about care, but then you have a licensure process that is really kind of sucking the life out of so many students and faculty and disciplines like that. And how do we prepare students? We want the best nurses to pass the licensure exam. How do we prepare them for that licensure exam? I don't think we do it by giving them a hundred cruel standardized tests. Some ways you prepare them better for that by saying, hey, let's talk about the cruelty of standardized tests that better prepares them and better helps them have the tools that they need when they get to that.
Speaker 1:So how do we bring students along on this journey or get them actually bought in? Do you have any advice for folks who are looking to get started with this?
Speaker 3:I think I mean the answer. Oftentimes people imagine that I go in on the first day and I spend an hour talking to students about my assessment practices. I don't, I don't go in talking about assessment at all. I go in on the first day and I talk about what they're interested in, what I'm interested in, and I talk about the topics and the discipline that we're going to be dealing with over the course of the term. And so in some ways, I think one thing we can do is kind of delay the conversation a little bit, because if we come in on the first day before we actually know each other, before we trust one another, this seems like some weird thing that you're throwing at students and they essentially rightfully, would feel oh God, not another thing that I have to deal with, and we don't want students to feel that. We want students to feel you know, to build relationships with each other and with us.
Speaker 3:And so I think, delaying the conversation a little bit, which means coming to the conversation when they need it as opposed to when we feel like we need to do it because we're scared Because that's what I mean teachers are scared, as scared of trying something new as students are, and so we want to kind of get it.
Speaker 3:You know, deal with it as quickly as we possibly like, but sitting in that hard confusion is good for a certain amount of time. And then the other thing that I would say is just reassuring students, looking at them in the eye and saying I'm not going to pull a rug out from under you. This is what we're doing and this is why we're doing it. This is why it's important to me. Here's what I hope you get out of it Tell me if you feel anxiety at any point, talk to me, asking for that same clear and direct communication for them. So don't imagine that, oh, I'm going to be nice and chipper and then students are going to believe that I'm not going to pull a rug out from under them. That's just not the way that that works. They've had lots of nice teachers who have stopped them from getting into graduate school by giving them an A, minus, minus, whatever that means.
Speaker 2:Jesse, undoing the grade is the culmination of decades of thinking in the trenches. Work on your part. Writing a book is never easy. Where do you hope this takes faculty and students?
Speaker 3:What I want it to do is I want it to take all of this thinking that I've been doing over 20 years and put it together in one place so that teachers who are struggling can sort of they don't have to hunt and peck around the internet, they can sort of see my train of thinking, and they can. Also I want them to see kind of my idea and my change and my growth in process, like here's what I thought, here's what I've continued to think, here's what I've changed my mind about, here's what I'm now asking questions about, and so they can recognize oh, that's what I do too, and I guess the thing I would hope that it does for everybody is create a conversation, have people asking questions and give people a starting point for having the conversations that I think that because the work isn't in the book, I don't think the work is the conversation that the book prods into existence.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's a great note to end on, jesse, I just can't say how much I appreciate your commitment to this combination of caring and demanding that your work is really inviting us to pursue. I think grading clearly is problematic. We all recognize it in the pain of sitting down to a stack of papers. So how can we find our way forward? I appreciate your shining some light on us, thanks.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for this conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, jesse. You bring a lot in the way of insight, guidance, compassion and, obviously, a ton of experience to this conversation. But what I think makes your book so compelling is the sense of mission it conveys. That really came across when I read it and and reminding us of what I think is the true aim of higher education acquiring knowledge and competency, yes, but also learning about ourselves, what we value, what fires our own passion as individuals. So, thank you, and it's been amazing speaking with you today, and I would encourage anyone interested in exploring this topic further by picking up a copy of Undoing the Grade why we Grade and how to Stop it, and I just absolutely adore that title. With that, thanks to all of you for tuning in and we'll talk to you again soon.
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