When: March 7, 2019, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm Where: Charlotte Frank Classroom (1203 HE)
Presenter(s): Jeff Allred (English); Allen Strouse (English); Austin Bailey (English, WAC Fellow)
Giving grades is a complex yet underexamined phenomenon. On the one hand, grading is an intimate and loaded individual exchange with students, where we exercise our authority to (one hopes) help students reflect and push them to do their best work. On the other hand, grading links us to broader institutional frames, standardizing our qualitative evaluation into quantitative measures and sorting students, in effect, in ways that shape their postgraduate lives. A number of prominent voices in the academy have questioned not just how we grade, but why we grade altogether, arguing that our usual modes of grading send the wrong message to students and discourage deep learning. In this panel, we will hear from two English professors who have explored alternatives to traditional grading in their courses, with an overview of the topic from a third. Recent articles from Susan Blum, Jesse Stommel, and Maha Bali give brief discussions of the theory and practice of this emerging mode of “ungrading.”