Grading schemes must obey the Prime Directive.
Any use of grades that encourages “doing school” must be eliminated. Some common strategies, like offering extra credit, must be checked to ensure that they are stimulating self-directed learning, and not just the accumulation of points.
Learning is analogue, grading is digital.
Grades cause learning to be quantified. Breaking currency into discrete dollars and cents is appropriate. Breaking the learning of a new skill or concept into such pieces is not.
Hold grades lightly.
Grades can be most useful if they serve not as the end of the learning process, but rather as the starting point for discussing your students’ progress. Pretending that grades are objective and not open to discussion undermines your authenticity as a partner in your students’ learning process.
Grades should be actively deemphasized.
The focus in every conversation about evaluation should be shifted from “Did I get an A?” to “Have I learned it?” Our job is to liberate ourselves and our students from the tyranny of points.
Feedback works best when it is ungraded.
Grades have a corrosive effect on motivation. Removing the lure of grades frees the student (and you) up to truly pay attention to what the feedback is saying about steering the learning process.
Feedback is more important than grades.
Giving useful feedback to students is an essential aspect of teaching, but giving feedback and giving grades are not synonymous. Good feedback is an integral part of the student’s learning process, and helps the student know how to steer that process. Grades, on the other hand, are a way of evaluating the success of that process and ultimately reporting about it after the fact.
Students should self-evaluate their own work as often as possible.
Unless there is a compelling reason for them not to — say for security reasons when reviewing a test — the default position should be self-evaluation. Having a student assess her own work increases her “buy-in” and reduces potential power struggles or resentment about grades. Students can also give feedback to their peers. Self- and peer-evaluation requires a level of responsibility that many students have never experienced.
Trust, but verify.
Students need to be taught to be honest and accurate in assessing their own work. Most of them have had no experience in this essential skill. Giving them freedom therefore requires checking up on how the self-evaluate, particularly when they are first learning how to do it. It must be done in a way that trusts the student’s integrity; verifying their self-evaluation should be seen as feedback on how to do it more accurately.
Self-evaluation helps diffuse the traditional classroom power structure.
Self-evaluation helps students reclaim a sense of self-reliance and responsibility for the quality of their own work. They feel a sense of ownership that is missing when teachers give them grades. Self-evaluation replaces their dependence on the teacher’s doling out of points, a process that is fraught with real and perceived injustices and abuses of power.
The assessment of genuine learning requires more than numbers.
Multiple formats with multiple inputs from multiple sources make assessment more robust and accurate. Student reflections and self-evaluations can serve an important function in making grades more meaningful.
Grades are unreliable measures of learning, and are always subjective.
No matter how precisely grades are computed, they are still crude measures of the infinitely complex process of learning. No matter how complex and rational a grading system is, there are always alternatives that are equally valid, even if they are very different.
Grades can be the basis of worthwhile conversations.
When the weight of grades has been reduced by focussing on self-directed learning, they can lead to useful conversations with deep and meaningful feedback for the student. They can direct the topic from mere scores to a discussion of the how a student can steer his own personal growth.
Giving students a voice during grade conferences boosts their self-awareness, both academically and in terms of their personal growth.
It is a powerful tool for instilling a sense of ownership and responsibility.