Susan D. Blum

American linguistic anthropologist (Susan Debra Blum), Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. The research programme that anchors her academic career is the linguistic anthropology of contemporary China — Lies That Bind (Hawaii, 2007) and My Word! (Cornell, 2009) are field studies of speech, lying, and academic dishonesty in undergraduate populations — and a wider programme on the cultural anthropology of contemporary US higher education. The book that matters for this topic is the edited volume Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (West Virginia University Press, 2020), which gathered the contemporary US ungrading conversation into a single reference.

Stake§

Blum's stake in the ungrading argument is the long-form scholar-and-teacher one of someone who has been practising versions of the approach in her own classes since the late 2000s. The 2020 edited volume is her consolidating contribution: rather than a single-author polemic, the book gathers fifteen contributors across disciplines (Jesse Stommel, Joy Karen Eyre, Aaron Barlow, Cathy Davidson, and others) into a collective statement of the position. Her own opening and closing chapters frame the conversation; the contributors supply the worked-implementation chapters that argue the approach is practicable across different institutional contexts.

The 2020 volume is the consolidating reference for the contemporary US ungrading movement. The book's argument has two layers. The first is the empirical case against grades — substantially the case Kohn has been making since the 1990s, backed by Butler 1988 and the wider intrinsic-motivation literature, and extended with twenty-first-century material on stress, mental health, and student-faculty relationships. The second is the implementation case: fifteen working teachers describing how they have removed conventional grades from their classes while remaining inside grade-required institutions, what has worked, and what has not.

Blum's own contribution to the volume — the opening chapter Why Ungrade? Why Grade? and the closing chapter What We Lose When We Grade — is more anthropological than the rest. The argument is that the practice of assigning a single graduated symbol to a piece of student work is a cultural artefact of a particular educational tradition, not a natural or necessary feature of teaching; that the practice produces documented harms (Butler 1988, the stress-and-anxiety literature, the corruption of feedback into score-justification); and that not grading is a recoverable practice in higher education even when grades are institutionally required, because the work that matters can be located in feedback, conversation, and revision rather than in the terminal symbol.

The West Virginia University Press edition has been adopted in teaching-and-learning centres in several countries; the #ungrading hashtag carries an active conversation among university teachers; the contributors' worked-implementation accounts are the practical anchor for teachers attempting the move. The empirical case for the approach — what happens to student learning when grades are removed — remains under-studied; most accounts in the book are qualitative and self-reported, which is the recurring methodological critique of the wider grading-reform literature.

Blum's earlier work on cheating and academic dishonesty (My Word!, 2009) supplies a particular reading of the grading apparatus that the ungrading work develops: the adversarial relationship the conventional grade produces between student and teacher, the displacement of attention from learning to grade-protection, and the institutional inability to detect or address the displacement once it has happened. The ungrading argument is, on this reading, partly a response to a problem that the grading apparatus itself produces.