Ungrading
An umbrella term for teaching that strips conventional grades off ongoing work and puts feedback, conversation, peer response, and self-assessment in their place. It rarely abolishes grades outright — a school usually still demands a final letter — but it pulls that final grade away from the day-to-day learning, settling it by negotiation, by completion of agreed work, or by the student's own judgement. The wager is that a score sitting next to a comment makes students chase the score and ignore the comment.
An umbrella term for teaching practices that remove conventional grades from formative work and replace them with some combination of written feedback, conversation, peer response, self-assessment, and a terminal grade that is either collaboratively negotiated or determined by completion rather than performance. The approach does not, in most implementations, abolish grades entirely — institutional apparatus typically requires a final letter or number — but decouples that terminal grade from the formative loop that produces the learning. The implementation form varies: some practitioners use labour-based grading, where the grade is determined by what work the student did rather than how the work was judged; some use contract grading, where the student and teacher agree at the start of the term on what combination of work corresponds to which grade; some use self-grading, where the student assigns their own final grade with the teacher's input.
Etymology§
The verb to ungrade appears in US higher-education teaching circles by the early 2010s, gathered into a recognised conversation through Jesse Stommel's blog writing and the Hybrid Pedagogy journal from around 2017 onwards. The consolidating reference is Susan Blum's edited Ungrading volume (West Virginia University Press, 2020), which gathered fifteen contributors across disciplines into a single statement of the position. The intellectual lineage runs back substantially further: Kohn's Punished by Rewards (1993) and The Case Against Grades (2011) are the immediate precursors; Peter Elbow's contract-grading writing in writing-studies (1993, 1997) is the procedural antecedent; the deeper roots reach into intrinsic-motivation research (Deci 1971) and progressive- education traditions stretching back to Dewey.
The construct's argument has two layers. The first is the empirical case for why grades and formative feedback should not be co-delivered: Butler 1988's finding that scores attached to comments cause students to attend to the scores and ignore the comments, replicated across multiple subsequent studies; the wider intrinsic- motivation literature on the over-justification effect; and the twenty-first-century literature on grade-related stress, anxiety, and corrupted student-faculty relationships. The empirical case is the same one Kohn has been making since the 1990s; the ungrading move is the structural response.
The second layer is implementation. Ungrading does not, in most contemporary practice, mean no judgement of work — written feedback, peer review, conversation, and revision are all preserved and typically intensified. What is removed is the continuous-scale graduated symbol attached to individual pieces of formative work. The terminal grade required by the institution is either determined collaboratively (a conversation at the end of the term in which student and teacher agree on what grade the body of work warrants), by completion (the student receives the grade contracted for at the start of the term if the contracted work was done), or by self-assessment (the student proposes a grade and the teacher accepts or negotiates).
The construct's relationship to specifications grading is one of degree rather than kind. Both schemes decouple formative feedback from continuous-scale judgement and substitute a different terminal-grade mechanism. Specifications grading keeps a procedural grade-determination structure (meeting bundles of specifications); ungrading more often removes the procedural structure as well, treating the terminal grade as a conversation rather than a calculation. Practitioners move between the two, and the Ungrading volume includes chapters by teachers using each.
The construct's reach has been substantial in higher education, particularly in writing studies, mathematics teaching, and humanities seminars; less so in K-12, where institutional grade- book requirements are stricter, and in STEM lab and assessment- heavy courses, where the structural constraints are different. The empirical case for the approach — what happens to student learning when the practice is implemented — remains under- studied. Most published accounts are qualitative and self- reported, which is the recurring methodological critique. The construct is the most recent of the grading-reform moves in the topic's literature.