Power of P/NP

Reading through the questions/comments from people signing up for the Ungrading EdCamp this week, I wanted to say something about this item in thread about “Everyday advocacy" for ungraders: How to challenge the systems that are in place in HE institutions to make the process possible.

The single best change I think we could make in higher ed institutions is to switch to far wider use of P/NP. We saw a lot of schools adopt temporary P/NP policies in the pandemic, and I have to admit that I was bitterly disappointed to see those P/NP policies rolled back, sometimes after just one semester (that's what happened at my school). Still, the fact that so many schools publicly acknowledge the viability and usefulness of P/NP grading was a real watershed moment, and I tried to document that as it was happening, bookmarking hundreds of school policies as they were posted online. I also did a presentation about pandemic P/NP grading which you can read here, right in that pandemic moment -- April 2020: Ungrading in the Pandemic; Ungrading in the Classroom.

At heart, the U.S. university degree system is essentially a P/NP system: students GRADUATE; they get their degree. They don't get an "A-class" degree or a "B-class degree" etc., and their GPA is not printed on the diploma. Although the GPA exerts a horrifying influence on many university procedures and is used by gatekeeping in so many wrong ways, the graduation process is basically a P/NP process, and that's what makes me hopeful that we could ultimately move towards an all-P/NP approach.

If there has to be a GPA for gatekeeping purposes, I would advocate for an approach where there are A-B-C letter grades (no pluses, no minuses), and no D, no F. If a student has not passed a course satisfactorily, there is simply no record, NR. I learned about this from Kristin Wobbe at Twitter; it's the system they use at Worcester Polytechnic. You can read more about that here: WPI Grade System.

That's basically the approach I used in my classes: very broad swathes of A-B-C (based on the students' own personal "need" for a particular grade), with me working hard to make sure everybody passed. I didn't care about the As, Bs, Cs at all; the students handled that on their own — my goal was just for everybody to pass. I would have preferred just P/NP (like during the pandemic semester of alternate grading), but at least A-B-C was not too horrible; I'm very fortunate that my school did not have pluses and minuses, so all I had to do was carve out the A-B-C territory and let the students set their own goals inside that simple framework.

Anyway, the pandemic gave me a kind of hope that I had never had before that we might see real advances in the use of P/NP at the institutional level. Yes, those hopes were dashed as schools quickly rescinded their pandemic policies (even though we are STILL IN A PANDEMIC)... but if it happened once, it can happen again, and P/NP grading is still on my ungrading wishlist.

You can see the other items on my ungrading wishlist here: Grading.LauraGibbs.net.

What's on your ungrading wishlist? I'm looking forward to learning what is going on in other classrooms and at other schools in the EdCamp this week!

Ungrading is FUN-damental

I'll be participating in the #Ungrading EdCamp starting tomorrow (Thursday, Nov. 4), and David Buck shared a list of the questions and comments that people shared via a Google Form he had set up, and I'm going to write up some blog posts responding to ones that I really connected with, like this one:

I'd like to see more discussion about why #ungrading can be a highly effective way to reduce day-to-day stress for faculty and minimize potential conflicts with students. Most public discourse about ungrading focuses on the benefits to students, which is totally cool of course, but I want more instructors to know WHY ungrading can make their teaching more fun, as well as more effective.

I can really connect here because my primary reason for ungrading was selfish: I was pretty sure that ungrading would have big benefits for my students... but first of all, it was self-preservation. Having to put grades on student writing was literally making me sick. I agonized over every single grade because I honestly had no idea what grade I was supposed to put on a piece of writing! In grad school, I had taught foreign languages (Latin, Greek, Polish), and in those kinds of classes there would be quizzes, tests, and the arbitrary but not-so-agonizing percentages that you could use to assign grades.

But grading a piece of writing? How could I put some number or letter on a piece of writing?

If I put a B or a C on a piece of writing, the only message a student would take away from that was negative... and if I put an A on something, it was kind of like saying "all done; no more learning on the agenda here."

Those would be exactly the WRONG messages that I want to send to students, where I want to always build on the positive (while grades lower than A are mostly all about the negatives and a deficit approach), and always keep things moving forward... because as a writer, I know that all kinds of writing can be improved, assuming we have the luxury of time to keep working on it: no matter who the writer, no matter what the writing, there is always more that we can do and learn, A grade or not.

So, for my own sanity, I had to stop putting grades on student writing in order to focus on feedback instead. (Before "ungrading" became a thing, I would sometimes call this approach all-feedback-no-grades.) With some help and ideas from students, I came up with a system so that they could determine very easily a final grade for me to submit at the end of the semester... and the students' totally positive response to ungrading over the years made me very happy of course; you can see their ungrading comments on end-of-course evaluations here.

But even if their reaction to ungrading had just been ambivalent instead of enthusiastic, that would have been okay because I started ungrading for me, so that I could actually be a teacher instead of a judge (or, worse, a cop).

If you're curious about the details, you can read more here: Grading.MythFolklore.net.

I'm old enough to have grown up with RIF: Reading is Fundamental, so I'll adapt that to say Ungrading is FUN-damental. I want to be having fun together with the students. Ungrading is what makes that possible.

(cat toys meme)

What Students Say... about Grading, Creativity, and Freedom

The most encouraging part of ungrading for me has been the positive response from students. You can read about my ungrading approach, and below you can read student remarks about grading, creativity, and freedom from ten years' worth of course evaluations. Press reload to see another selection at random.

about grades:

about creativity:

about freedom:

And here's a word cloud of the responses:

And if you're curious how to make these kinds of randomizers, I wrote some notes out here at a previous post: Story Seed Randomizer.