Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)

Ungrading is an edited collection, not a single-author book, and that shapes how it should be read. Its editor, Susan D. Blum, is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, where she has spent most of her career; her earlier books include My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (2009) and "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College (2016), so her route into the grading question came through ethnographic study of how undergraduates actually experience higher education rather than through measurement or assessment research. She wrote the introduction and one chapter, and assembled the rest.

The book was published in 2020 by West Virginia University Press, in its "Teaching and Learning in Higher Education" series — a university press with a real editorial process, though an edited volume's filter is the editor's selection of contributors as much as external review. The fifteen contributors are a mix of K–12 teachers and college faculty across the humanities and the sciences: among them Jesse Stommel, Starr Sackstein, Cathy Davidson, Laura Gibbs, Christina Katopodis, John Warner, Aaron Blackwelder, and Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh. The foreword is by Alfie Kohn. Each chapter is a practitioner's account — what one teacher tried, in one set of courses, and what happened — written close to the date of the teaching it describes.

This makes the volume tertiary as a body of evidence and primary as testimony. It synthesises no datasets and runs no experiments; each chapter is one educator's first-person report of going gradeless, and the chapters vary in how much they cite. Its standing in this set is as the book that gave the "ungrading" movement its name and its bibliography in one binding. It builds directly on Alfie Kohn's argument that grades damage learning — Kohn wrote its foreword, and his case is the diagnosis the contributors take as their starting point. It stands beside Linda Nilson's Specifications Grading as one of two reform proposals working the same problem from opposite ends: where Nilson keeps letter grades and reorganises the criteria behind them, the Ungrading contributors mostly remove the grade from the learning process and restore it only at the end where an institution requires one.

The stake is openly advocatory. The book exists to make a case — that rating students undermines learning — and Blum's introduction states the position rather than testing it. The contributors are teachers describing practices they have committed to and, in several cases, written and spoken about elsewhere; the gain is reputational and professional, the standing that comes from being identified with a named movement. What the volume supplies is a collection of practitioner experience and a bibliography for the argument; it does not supply controlled evidence on whether ungrading produces better outcomes than grading, and no chapter claims to.