What Grade Abatement Isn’t
In her 1977 book, On Photography, Susan Sontag tells us that “[i]n teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” It’s a novel use of “grammar” — a word usually associated with English teachers attacking spliced commas and split infinitives — but it means only that there are rules in play, even if we are unaware of them.
There are rules in teaching, too, that we don’t usually question, especially when it comes to grading. Grades create a grammar and ethics of learning — an implicit code about why we learn and how we assess that learning. What I call grade abatement is an attempt to change this. It is an attempt to shift the focus from grading to authentic learning — to circumvent the harmful effects of grading on student self-efficacy and productivity.
It may be most helpful to discuss first what grade abatement isn’t:
1. Students do not “choose” their own grades. The verb is in quotation marks because students do participate in the process; that process is precise and data-driven, however, with no element left open to subjectivity. We use Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgement informed by evidence.” This guide covers that process, and the instructional post for that process is embedded further down. Here is a direct link: The GAP Process.
2. It does not exist to give the teacher more time. Grade abatement takes about the same amount of time as traditional grading, because of the amount of oversight and feedback required to help students learn without the old crutch of grades. The difference is in how that time is spent. It feels better — more authentic, more useful — in comparison to the sometimes ambiguous and usually frustrating mechanisms we are used to.
3. It does not change the frequency or quality of teacher feedback. It heightens that feedback, in fact, because there is no number attached. Students have to grapple with the specific feedback given to their performance, and they lose the limbic resistance that comes with lost points. There’s no shorthand, because there’s no number. Their focus shifts from numbers to the skills and knowledge being learned. Here is an explanation of that shift: A Better Form of Feedback.
Why Grade Abatement Is Necessary
As for what grade abatement is, it’s best to start with why it’s necessary. Alfie Kohn breaks down the harmful effects of traditional grading in his essay, “The Case Against Grades,” which is really required reading for anyone hoping to understand grade abatement. From Kohn’s opening:
By now enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when you stop to think about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. We need to collect information about how students are doing, and then we need to share that information (along with our judgments, perhaps) with the students and their parents. Gather and report — that’s pretty much it.
You say the devil is in the details? Maybe so, but I’d argue that too much attention to the particulars of implementation may be distracting us from the bigger picture — or at least from a pair of remarkable conclusions that emerge from the best theory, practice, and research on the subject: Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.
The italicized sentence is what I keep in mind: Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. The crux of grade abatement is this belief. We can gather and assess all the information we need to help students learn without resorting to grades on individual assignments, and the grades we do use can be stripped of most of their harmful effects.
Here are a few more critical points to address, before we delve into how grade abatement works:
1. Grades aren’t necessarily toxic. The presence of grades does not preclude effective teaching and learning. In fact, the case can be made that grades are useful, that they motivate students, that they provide valuable data, and so on. It also doesn’t do us any good to demonize grades. Instead, we need to acknowledge that…
2. Grades do warp learning. Grades change the learning environment. Kohn covers a lot of the research worth studying — research into student engagement, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and so on; again, his essay on this is pretty much required reading — but anyone with experience in a classroom knows what grades do. As soon as numbers are introduced, the student’s relationship to the material changes. So does the teacher’s relationship to the material— and to the students. That’s why the quotation at the start of Kohn’s essay rings so true: When the student, Claire, says, “I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing… [s]uddenly all the joy was taken away,” we hear our own students. And that’s because…
3. While grades aren’t necessarily toxic, they are vectors for toxicity. Think of them as clouds of mosquitoes in a malaria-ravaged country. Grades lead to gamesmanship, cheating, hyper-competitiveness, disengagement, and almost every other enemy of authentic learning. Students scrap and fight over a hundredth of a point. They define their self-worth in numbers. They’re afraid to take risks. Grades spread this negativity from assignment to assignment and quarter to quarter. The positive impact of grades (and that’s a questionable list in the first place) is eclipsed entirely by the negative effects. Which is why it’s so unfortunate that…
4. Whatever we believe, grades are unavoidable. It isn’t possible to abolish grades in a public high school. You might as well try exterminating every mosquito in the country. What we can change is the extent to which grades affect learning in our classrooms. We can’t change the entire system, but we can remove grades from most steps in the learning process, chip away at a student’s extrinsic motivations, and build a sustainable and self-powered kind of learning.
What Grade Abatement Is
The word “abatement” is the key: Since we can’t abolish grades, we must try to abate their negative effects. The primary goal is to establish profiles — grade abatement profiles, or GAPs — of each student, and then to apply a holistic assessment through those profiles. The complete process has its own corner of this site:
The process is complex. That makes sense. This is not a small shift. It requires changes to instruction, assessment, and feedback. It can be broken down, though, which is what I’ll do here.
It starts with traits that teachers can observe and students can hone: amenability, collegiality, and assiduousness. Then we consider general skills that support learning: organization, autodidactic strength, metacognition, and the ability to collaborate empathetically. Finally, we consider the core skills of critical thinking, close reading, and effective communication.
The last three skills are universal to all learning, and they are most readily measured through some kind of artifact: essays, multiple-choice tests, presentations, and so on. Instead of number grades, however, those artifacts are filtered through the complete constellation of learning: how amenable the student was to feedback, how collegial and collaborative he was, how well he understood his own learning process, and so on.
Of these, metacognition may be the most important skill, because it allows the student and teacher to parse, quantify, and evaluate elements of learning that can’t be tested by traditional means. Metacognition is also the most important element for achieving a better form of feedback, which has its own complex post.
At some predetermined point, the teacher and student collaborate on a holistic assessment of the student’s total progress and output. In the Humanities makerspace, this assessment occurs every three weeks, using technology and old-fashioned analysis to give the work a new kind of authenticity. The evidence is gathered in a way that invites honesty and introspection. The student is a partner in the process, helping to fill in the teacher’s observations and notes. Then the profiles are used to translate that evidence, including any final conferences or writing responses, into a number.
The full GAP guide has a copy of the rubric and a description of each profile, plus detailed explanations of each criterion and element of the process. Most of the particulars wouldn’t change if this process was adapted for other courses, because we are really talking about the basic components of learning. Moreover, the language of each profile is precise enough to prevent ambiguity, while giving students a significant amount of agency and choice.
Here are the skills and traits written out more generally:
- The skill of reading closely to build empathy, broaden knowledge, and emulate authors
- The skill of thinking critically, especially in answering essential questions
- The skill of communicating effectively, especially in writing
- Assiduousness, or the ability to persevere in completing difficult tasks
- Amenability, or the ability to take criticism well and use it effectively
- Collegiality, or the ability to collaborate with peers to read, write, and think
- Metacognitive aptitude, especially as demonstrated in journals and self-assessments
- Autodidactic aptitude, especially in navigating an interstitial classroom
They can then be paired under more precise labels:
Collegiality ⇆ Empathy | The crux of the course and the stuff of growth, especially in a collaborative learning environment. Empathy is a skill built through discussion, writing, and reading in the Humanities.
Integrity + Character | The focus on individual learning environments and experiences, especially the honesty and openness necessary to take risks. Character is built through the internal and external artifacts below.
Close Reading ⟹ Internalization | Encompasses the texts analyzed for emulative purposes, the universal languages and structures memorized, and the literature read to develop empathy.
Critical Thinking ⟹ Metacognition | The problems being solved, the meaning being made, and, most importantly, the thinking that drives every iterative and individual choice.
Effective Communication ⟹ Writing | Employs bishop composition to centralize writing, especially essay writing, among other discussions and communications.
Amenability ⇆ Self-Awareness | Requires an awareness and acceptance of critical and constructive feedback from all stakeholders in the atelier environment. Especially focused on radial discussion, proxy feedback, and metacognitive analysis.
Assiduousness ⇆ Self-Efficacy | How to live like an academic tardigrade: testing limits, adapting to challenges, and embracing failure as a necessary step in learning. Builds the muscles to beat down procrastination, impulsivity, and complacency.
Organization ⟹ Autodidacticism | The systemic, systematic, and individualized approach to getting things done. The “secret” skill that frames the rest and enables self-directed learning.
The ⇆, +, and ⟹ convey a relationship of sorts, which is the point: These skills and traits connect to each other, support each other, etc., in a way that matters. Understanding that lets us develop a single sheet — a handout that can be posted, downloaded, photocopied, and so on. That’s an essential step in making this usable in a classroom: taking a complex process and giving it an intuitive user interface.
The final step takes those skills and traits and connects them to the profiles, which can again be presented through a more user-friendly handout:
The two fonts are due to my stumbling into this excellent infographic. One handout is better for online use; the other, for photocopies.
Iterative note: This is always evolving, which is really the point of a makerspace. Here is another version of the profiles, with a breakout of each tier: Grade Abatement – Tier Guide
Efficacy and Transparency
Grade abatement is student-centered, but the teacher must build, tweak, and tune the machinery. It’s ongoing and iterative. This requires flexibility and a kind of interstitial access to student evidence — a means of taking notes and marking progress throughout the assessment period. The narrative comes together over time; after a few weeks, for instance, it should be more or less clear to both the teacher and student which tier fits. Technology is invaluable here, because it makes the data readily available and trackable over time.
The skills and traits required in all classes are, at a basic level, the same, which is why the profiles are essential. Beyond the profiles, the teacher needs to distinguish a set of more specific criteria. What are the most important artifacts produced by students? What skills are tested on state or national exams tied to this course? When are students most responsible for their own learning?
The key to all of this — gathering evidence, collaborating with students, compiling GAP narratives, and arriving at a profile score — is efficacy. We can use the definition implied by Jerry Jesness:
Grades are educational quality control, and passing grades “prove” that teacher, student, and school are successful; therefore, the “best” teachers are those who give the highest grades, and the “best” administrators are those who can convince their teachers to do so. In this bizarre system, it is better to teach 10 vocabulary words than 100. If a teacher assigns 10 words and the student learns eight, the student scores 80 on the exam and both teacher and student are successful. If the teacher teaches 100 words and the student learns 50, both student and teacher have failed, even though the second student has learned more than six times as much…
The entire essay, “Why Johnny Can’t Fail” (published in Harper’s in 1999) goes a long way toward identifying how a dependence on grades warps our teaching, and it echoes Kohn’s logic and research into how grades corrupt authentic learning and effective feedback.
The GAP process, in contrast, lets us create assignments with efficacy, and it helps students to recognize, report on, and utilize that efficacy. That leads to the second watchword: transparency. Sharing GAP guides — this is one among dozens — with students gives them more control. There is a blueprint for the learning process, and that transparency should empower students to focus on the skills and knowledge they truly need. There are stakeholder guides, system update notes, and archives of pretty much every iteration.
It’s all part of a kind of engineering redundancy. I repeat and repeatedly connect the elements of instruction, assessment, and feedback so that we have failsafes in place. It becomes nearly impossible to be uninformed or misinformed about grade abatement or any of its mechanisms, except through willful ignorance, spite, or a weird kind of rumor-mongering. That happens, of course, but more and more, it happens only outside of the classroom, with stakeholders who are consumed by their own issues1.
And this matters because grade abatement is important. It lets us focus on learning. It lets us sharpen student skills and deepen their knowledge and inculcate the traits they will need for the rest of their academic and post-academic lives. It prevents the entitlement, grade inflation, and social promotion that hurts learning, replacing all of that with the potential for a radically different environment. Grade abatement let me build this makerspace, and this makerspace does wonders for students:
Sisyphean High
Use the top menus to navigate this site. The course syllabus is embedded here, since that is the fastest and most comprehensive way for students and all other stakeholders to start learning about what a Humanities makerspace is.
Isaac Asimov identified one of the issues with paradigm shifts: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ↩