A Study of Ungrading in Upper-level Political Theory Courses

AbstractThis paper presents results from qualitative student reflections from three upper-level courses taught using the "ungrading" pedagogy. This is a pedagogy that emphasizes student learning and self-evaluation by omitting quantitative grades, replacing them with a structure where students evaluate themselves and define their own grades for the course. This work draws on comments taken from student reflections and personal accounts of the course design and outcomes presented as a comprehensive reflection on the pedagogy. The goal of these reflections is to present the advantages and challenges of using such a system and a firsthand account for instructors who are interested in alternative grading schemes. Overall, students found ungrading to be initially worrying, but ultimately rewarding. Student work improved and individual students reflected on the innovative nature of the class, providing concrete suggestions for future iterations.Keywords: Ungradingpedagogypolitical theoryclassroom climategrading efficiency Notes1 Contract grading is a grading format where students are graded on the number of assignments they complete and are not assessed on specific content. The instructor sets out the number of assignments required for each letter grade and the students decide how many assignments they want to complete. Specifications grading, or specs grading, is when an instructor establishes the specifications for each assignment, and a student receives credit when they meet the specifications. These are then bundled together to make up a student's final grade. Standards-based grading is a similar approach, where student work is evaluated based on the standards established for the assignment.2 I have included a full guide for instructors wishing to undertake ungrading in the digital appendix.3 I freely admit that this is a particular interpretation of a methodological approach to political theory. More historicist or Straussian approaches to political theory argue that there may be a real or true interpretation of particular texts. However, I think my general point still stands; even if we believe that there are true interpretations, the actual context of these interpretations remains the subject of scholarly debate. My desire is not to settle these debates, but instead to argue that we should extend this debate into the classroom and allow students to engage with it, not subject them to a multiple-choice quiz about texts, with the presumption that we can easily know the true or correct interpretations.4 Full syllabi for all classes can be found in the digital appendix.5 The self-evaluation prompts can be found in the digital appendix.6 This may not be as radical as it might seem. Many universities have rejected standardized admissions testing in recent years—why not extend this to grades as well?7 IRB Number: HS 21-134. It was determined that the material collected does not meet the federal definition of human subjects research.8 I drew student responses from two of the three total ungraded classes. I was not able to get student consent for one of the "Capitalism, Socialism, and Political Theory" classes, as the class had concluded before I began this project, so I did not use any responses from that class. I collected the responses, anonymized them, and then categorized responses into broad thematic groupings. I then picked representative quotations from these groupings. The total number of responses and the similarities between them suggest that these comments I present below are very representative of broad student attitudes. Many students said very similar things, so I indicated below where there seemed to be a broad consensus.9 "Grade school" as a moniker seems to take on a new light when contrasted with ungrading.Additional informationNotes on contributorsE. Stefan KehlenbachE. Stefan Kehlenbach is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the intersection of technology, power, and politics, asking how the vast collection of data, used to fuel technology such as AI and machine learning, becomes invested with discourses of power and shapes our political futures. This develops a new critical theory of technology focused on data and datafication—the process of turning many aspects of our daily lives into data to be analyzed. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled The Age of Data: A New Critical Theory of Technology. His pedagogical research interests include ungrading, the impact of technology in the classroom and combining political theory research and teaching.

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