Since my wife is spending the holidays in a military dictatorship, I’ve had plenty of time to work on my spring term courses, and I’ve made some radical changes, partly as a reaction to the growing ubiquity of AI:
- I’ve completely replaced reading responses with machine-graded, somewhat AI-proofed Perusall assignments.
- A tweak to the in-class writing described in the linked post above: I won’t collect students’ notes. I’m not grading them, so why bother?
- Every two weeks, students will take a pen-and-paper exam with multiple choice questions on information contained in the assigned readings on Perusall.
- Although teammate evaluations will continue, I’ve turned project-related tasks like classroom presentations into ungraded activities.
These changes mark a shift away from my previous philosophy about student motivation, grading, and learning. Early in my career, I encountered students who refused to do anything that wasn’t graded — in reality, a rational response on their part to an educational system that prioritized grades over learning. My reaction? Formally assess everything that students did, to convey the message that everything was important for their learning.
The end result was an assessment regime with assignments worth in total well over 1,000 points but in which students needed only 950 points for an A. Again, I assumed this was a good thing — my intent was to give students opportunities to safely practice and improve, rather than to punish anyone who demonstrated less than constant perfection.
However, this system devolved over time into a treadmill of busywork that stripped students of responsibility over their own learning and didn’t reflect their actual performance. My grade distributions indicate that any student in one of my courses who puts in enough time and effort gets a A, everyone else gets an F. The B’s and C’s that used to be common aren’t there anymore.
So, in sum, I’m no longer going to grade a lot of the stuff that happens in the courses that I teach. Students will have greater freedom to choose what to do and not do, and to experience the consequences. Perhaps it’s a small step toward ungrading.