Pointless in the Pandemic

“What are you doing about grades?”

“I have so many A’s. I’m just giving them credit for completing the work.”

“How are you giving tests? It’s so easy to cheat!”

“I’m just giving everyone an A. It doesn’t matter.”

These are just a few of the things my colleagues said about grades during the pandemic. It was a constant topic of conversation because literally overnight we could not teach or assess in the ways we were used to. In addition to becoming remote instructors, many of us had to become homeschool teachers for our own elementary-age children. It was bananas—to say the least.

Of all the changes I had to contend with, assessment was the least of my concerns. I had already stopped giving tests. My students were all working on research projects, which was actually really well-suited to the largely asynchronous instructional model my school was practicing. I set due dates for different installments, read their submissions, commented in the rubrics about what they needed to do to improve, and sent the work back. It was a bit like a volleyball match as we continually bounced their writing back and forth, but it worked. 

My students noticed and appreciated this approach, saying, “This system transitioned really well into online learning,” and “I thought that the gradeless experience went really well this quarter, especially given the circumstances of not being in school.” 

Both my students and I felt that even though we were not physically together, we were all still doing meaningful work. I was flexible with due dates and held conferences over Zoom whenever students needed to talk to me about their projects. And they were really focused on the work, not the grades. On the whole, their research projects were at least as good if not better than those completed under “normal” circumstances. The students used their extra time to conduct additional research, give each other feedback, and craft their writing. One student even reached out to someone she read about in one of her sources and arranged a personal interview. Not a requirement, obviously, but since there was no “upper limit” expectation for earning points, the students no longer stopped when they thought they had earned an A. One of my students spent an entire day editing her 8-page paper for conciseness. While she still would have earned an “A” on the paper had she not done this, she would not have felt as accomplished as she did when she invested the time and energy to improve her craft just because she wanted to.

The other reason for this outcome—and probably the only reason that my grading system did not collapse under its own weight last year—was that the shutdown forced me to simplify. This has never been easy for me. I am addicted to productivity, and I have high expectations for both myself and my students. But never in my fifteen-year career had “less is more” been more true. For at least one month, we just focused on research. I narrowed the skills I was assessing down to a “must have” list. And because I relaxed the expectations, the students actually worked harder and achieved more.

The lessons we learned during this time—about learning, about writing, about ourselves—were transformative. While it’s impossible to know for sure how my grading system would have fared if there had not been a pandemic, I do know for certain that having adopted a pointless grading system months before the shutdown is what kept both my students and me motivated to work hard through the end of the year. 

I knew I would spend some time reflecting and revising my system over the summer—as I will probably continue to do for many years—but I would not be going back to using traditional grades.