Writing Without Grades

Competition pervades our society.  Our capitalist economy is based on it; professional sports glorify it; television has created a new genre out of it.  Motivated students spend tremendous amounts of energy in their competition for grades, trying to outscore, outsmart, and outlast their classmates.

            Many of us were good students and bought into grading systems without giving them a second thought.  We proudly remember the A on a test we studied very hard for or the disappointing C on a paper we thought we had so carefully written.  As a new secondary English teacher, I believed in the power of grades to motivate students and, conversely, to punish them.  After several years of teaching, though, the grading of essays became a chore I despised even though I loved reading students' writing.  It was then that I decided to try what one professor had done in an undergraduate writing course, not grade individual pieces of writing, but rather base the final grade on the entire collection of work (this was in the day before we used the term “portfolio”).

I started not grading every piece of writing with my advanced senior English class.  While some students were resistant at first, by the school year's end, most of them appreciated the no-grading policy.  While they were still a bit uncomfortable with going gradeless, they admitted that their own opinions on their work and what they had learned mattered more than a simple letter grade.  Since I let go of grades in my own teaching, I've come to believe that they are the most misused and abused bits of data floating about our education system. 

In a profession that advocates production of new theory and pedagogical practices, we seem bewildered at the idea of finding workable alternatives to grading writing and solutions to the problems that arise when we rank our students and their writing with grades. I want to examine the psychological impact grades have in the classroom and beyond.  But first, we need to admit that grades only pretend to do what most people think they do, and they don't do what progressive teachers want them to do.

The Pretense of Grades

            Let's start with the very basics of what grades pretend to do.  Grades are the official way that people are informed of their progress within classes.  But what does the grade really mean?  What are we really informing students of when we assign grades?  That a student earned so many points, which equals a particular letter grade, which is arbitrarily decided by the academy, administrator, or teacher who is a part of it.  A single letter grade does not indicate a student's abilities, strengths, and weaknesses as a writer, nor does it reflect the student's progress within a semester of work.  Grades can never hope to communicate the complexity and richness of a classroom experience.

Grades also pretend to open up communication between students and teachers, but in some cases, grades actually discourage dialogue.  If the teacher assigns a student an A, there is usually little inquiry on the part of the student as to why he or she received that grade.  If students think they have been graded unfairly, there may be a dialogue between the student and teacher, though probably not a very productive one.  The teacher usually spends those conferences justifying the grade without discussing the student's abilities. 

Thus, while grades pretend to promote communication, they do so only ineffectively at best. 

What Grades Don't Do

The biggest pretense of grades is the idea that they promote motivation for better work on the part of the students.  In composition classrooms, well-intentioned teachers want to promote good writing through student revision and risk-taking.  Using grades encourages neither of these things.  The revision process in writing is sometimes actually discouraged by the use of grades.  Some teachers grade the rough draft, which tells students that they had better be as near to perfect as possible from the very beginning, much like the standardized written tests New York students must take. 

On another level, when students are asked to respond to each other's papers, some are reluctant or even refuse to participate, saying, in effect, "It's not my job."  These students are demonstrating their belief that "As long as the teacher is passing judgment, the teacher's judgment will matter more than the student's" (Baumann 173). 

            According to Alfie Kohn, students will do what they need to do to get their "reward" of a grade and no more (62).  Conversely, without grades, students are free to try controversial subjects and innovative styles without fear of failure.  In one of the most memorable student pieces I've ever read, a student wrote about his racist heritage.  His grandfather had been a major figure in the local Ku Klux Klan, and he discussed being torn between what his family had taught him and the positive experiences he had had interacting with other races.  I doubt that he would have had the courage to explore that topic if he thought he were being graded on that paper.

            The dialogue between students and teachers is also stymied in another way.  Many of us feel that the comments we make on student papers must justify the grade.  On an average paper, teachers feel compelled to point out weaknesses instead of concentrating on the strengths of the paper.  In a typical situation, the teacher shows the writer where he or she "went wrong" and how to improve on the next paper (i.e. how to get a better grade) instead of how to revise the current one.  Thus, instead of responding honestly to their writing, we let grades determine our comments. 

Grades—The Motivation Killer    

Probably the biggest argument that grading proponents use to perpetuate the system is that without grades, students will not be motivated to complete their work.  Actually, that line of thinking is right:  Rewards do motivate people—to get rewards (Kohn 67). 

Teachers who advocate grades for motivational purposes perpetuate the use of grades to threaten students, at least those who care about their grades.  Ironically, the students who are most likely to be threatened with grade-lowering are usually the ones who care the least about grades.  Students who don't think they can get an A are discouraged from trying, having no reason to apply themselves (Kohn 56).  The point is that using grades to motivate is an unacceptable practice that makes students dependent on grades to get work done instead appreciating learning in itself.

Besides, research has shown that students can be just as motivated to perform without grades. Robbins, Poper, and Herrod show that in a letter-writing project between their classes at the elementary, middle school, and college level, "all of [the students] expressed a high degree of commitment to doing their best work.  At times, students at all three levels put more effort into their letter writing than into their regular graded writing.  We might argue that this tendency rebuts the idea that students won't perform unless they receive a score for each product" (154).  Grades may motivate some students to earn higher grades, but there are other, more positive ways to foster learning.

            Alfie Kohn has published a more expansive work on motivation, Punished by Rewards, which clearly shows that rewards do not motivate people to produce quality work; on the contrary, they more often inhibit it.  While simple rewards may elicit certain actions from trained animals, human beings have something animals do not, a natural curiosity and a need to seek out challenges (25).  According to Kohn, numerous studies show that "pay" for performances either makes no difference or actually hurts performance or creativity in human subjects (45).  Perhaps this explains why A-Rod went only 4 for 41 (.098) in his last 12 post-season games despite being the second highest paid baseball player in history.

The best example of this theory is

the story of an elderly man who endured the insults of a crowd of ten-year-olds each day as they passed his house on their way home from school.  One afternoon he met the children on his lawn and announced that anyone who came back the next day and yelled rude comments about him would receive a dollar.  Amazed and excited, they showed up even earlier the next day, hollering epithets for all they were worth.  True to his word, the old man ambled out and paid everyone.  "Do the same tomorrow," he told them, "and you'll get twenty-five cents for your trouble."  The kids thought that was still pretty good and turned out again the next day to taunt him.  At the first catcall, he walked over with a roll of quarters and again paid off his hecklers.  "From now on," he announced, "I can give you only a penny for doing this."  The kids looked at each other in disbelief.  "A penny?" they repeated scornfully.  "Forget it!"  And they never came back again (71-2).

            The point is that when we make the goal of a task, such as writing, to get a reward, the intrinsic motivation becomes extrinsic, and it disappears when the reward disappears (Kohn 72).  No wonder many of my students tell me they don't write unless a teacher assigns it.

            It's time we used a more productive and user-friendly method for assessing student writing. 

Alternatives to Grading

Obviously, the system won't change overnight.  Even if we do eliminate most grades, all of us affected by grades will have to overcome years of indoctrination in the academic system.  There are small ways to start changing, though, as Kohn outlines in Punished by Rewards:  Remove the rewards, offer choices to students in terms of their tasks, encourage collaboration instead of competition between students, and make sure the content is worth knowing.  That way, educators won't have to bribe students with grades to learn (213-216). 

            One way we can foster intrinsic motivation seems to be to develop amicable relationships with and between writers.  As I've previously discussed, Robbins, Poper, and Herrod's letter-writing project shows that students were committed to writing for each other, sometimes even more so than for their graded assignments.

            Maja Wilson has recently suggested that teachers actually talk to their students about their work during the drafting process.  She advocates embracing the subjectivity that so many teachers try to avoid when grading and making the subjectivity useful by helping students look for “meaning and purpose behind different readers’ differing perspectives” (65).  Through this process, she says, students “develop their [own] perceptions and invest in their work” (65). They feel that what they are learning actually matters when they collaborate in this dialogue with their teachers.

            Adkison and Tchudi have championed a workable pass/fail system that employs student choice as an alternative to grading.   “The requirements for credit [in a course] are stated in terms of tasks or assignments to be completed.  The criteria for credit usually specify both the amount of work to be done and the kind of thoroughness and polish required for acceptance" (194-5).  As long as students do their best work and complete the work to an acceptable level, they will succeed. 

Conclusion   

Assessing writing without grading does not mean that we will abandon standards and that apathy and chaos will ensue in the classroom, as some educators would have us believe.  Rather, it means that students will be able to focus on learning about writing and achieving the standards rather than feeling pressured to perform and impress others by grades.  And it means that students will once again be motivated to write for the sheer satisfaction of writing and that we will look forward to reading and responding honestly to innovative and provocative writing.

Works Cited

Adkison, Stephen and Stephen Tchudi.  "Grading on Merit and Achievement:  Where Quality Meets Quantity." Alternatives to Grading Student Writing.  Ed. Stephen Tchudi.  Urbana, IL:  NCTE, 1997.  192-208.

Bauman, Marcy.  "What Grades Do for Us, and How to Do without Them." Alternatives to Grading Student Writing.  Ed. Stephen Tchudi.  Urbana, IL:  NCTE, 1997.  162-178.

Chandler, Kelly and Amy Muentener.  "Seeing How Good We Can Get It." Alternatives to Grading Student Writing.  Ed. Stephen Tchudi.  Urbana, IL:  NCTE, 1997.  180-190.

Guthrow, Mary B.  "Writing at Reading:  How a Junior Year in England Changes Student Writers." Alternatives to Grading Student Writing.  Ed. Stephen Tchudi.  Urbana, IL:  NCTE, 1997.  122-135.

Hutton, Patrice.  Letter.  Newsweek 7 July 2003:  18.

Kohn,  Alfie.  Punished by Rewards:   The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes.  Bridgewater, NJ: Replica Books, 1993.

O'Hagan, Liesel L.  "It's Broken—Fix It!"  Alternatives to Grading Student Writing.  Ed. Stephen Tchudi.  Urbana, IL:  NCTE, 1997.  3-13.

Robbins, Sarah, Sue Poper, and Jennifer Herrod.  "Assessment through Collaborative Critique." Alternatives to Grading Student Writing.  Ed. Stephen Tchudi.  Urbana, IL:  NCTE, 1997.  137-160.

Wilson, Maja.  “Why I Won’t Be Using Rubrics to Respond to Students Writing.”  English Journal 96.4 (March 2007): 62-66.