TL;DR
The grade abatement profile process really only requires this step-by-step guide:
Students who attend class regularly, complete their assignments, and listen to feedback can use that document for an evidentiary evaluation of their work. One of the only additional lectures or texts that is emphasized is this clarification of the process:
The rest of this post more thoroughly explores grade abatement, offering the history and reasoning behind the shift. There is a Guide to Stakeholder Involvement that covers feedback and instruction; this post is more specifically about assessment, although every aspect of the learning environment is involved.
This is an attempt to explain how we accomplish the “collective human judgment informed by evidence“ that Tony Wagner has described as fundamental to 21st-century learning. It’s an explanation of how we can transform assessment so totally that the toxic effects of grades are almost entirely gone1.
You can learn more about what a Humanities makerspace is, and how it helps prepare students for their futures, through any of the menus and pages on this site, Sisyphean High. Most of what you’ll find is ramiform or branch-like, too, by design; so you will see the same links and materials repeated.
The primary inspiration for grade abatement, again, is Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades,” which can be read here. Dozens of other folks much smarter than me further inspired it, but it was that 2011 article that started the shift.
The Rule of Three: Triptych Panels
First, the overview:
Grade-abated assessment is holistic, evidentiary, and profile-based. It evaluates the universal skills and traits that are likewise valued by colleges, careers, and the real world. These are the same 21st-century skills espoused by educational leaders like Wagner, detailed in Brewster’s Strategic Coherence Plan, and required in every job or career.
Early iterations of grade abatement discuss the impossibility of eliminating grades. Over time, the process has evolved from using one profile to reflect an entire quarter to using a metaphorical triptych, or three-panel picture, of the student:
Each “panel” corresponds to three weeks of a nine-week quarter, which is roughly 15 class meetings. The assessment process used every three weeks is outlined here:
This is, in essence, another TL;DR. That step-by-step guide includes the skills and traits we evaluate, the profiles that collect evidence into a picture of each student’s growth and progress, and directions for evaluating the evidence we collect. A lengthier breakdown is below (including even more copies of that document).
The GAP Assessment Process
All profile-based, grade-abated assessment starts with self-assessment. Students complete a form that guides them through an evaluation of the evidence they have produced in the indicated time frame. That self-assessment is then checked against the teacher’s observations and the evidence gathered through normal assignments. Then the teacher and student collaborate on selecting the appropriate profile.
The process is evidentiary and precise, because the profiles, skills, and traits are evidentiary and precise. It is about fact-finding and analysis, not “giving” a grade, as one of the earlier clarifications of the method explains. There is an objective reality to a student’s work. We can find it, if we are honest and collegial enough, and sometimes the process of becoming honest and collegial enough is just as important as the accuracy of that profile.
When a form is posted at the end of an assessment panel to Google Classroom, it can be completed by the students in or out of class. The necessary knowledge and understanding (e.g., the profiles, skills, and traits) are included as links or images within that form itself. In addition, the most important handouts are always posted alongside the self-assessment assignment and photocopied in class:
Those three are the crux of ongoing self-assessment and self-understanding. The middle one (which is helpfully bolded) is, again, the step-by-step process, and it is nearly enough by itself. If I had to add any more documents to the list of what is absolutely necessary, it would be these:
Those are interactive or instructional guides to how students should spend the class period. Face-to-face time is strongly correlated with whichever profile is eventually correct. To a sometimes surprising extent, staying actively engaged in class is all it takes; the rest of the learning process is almost a logical consequent of that investment and focus.
The guides and posts that follow are most useful to stakeholders who want an even better understanding of how this all works and why it is so important. All students need an understanding of at least what precedes this sentence to be successful; what follows will only deepen that success, as all investment in the learning environment does.
Skinner Unboxing
For most students, the greatest difficulty is controlling the Skinner-box part of the brain:
That post is from 2017, but it applies, still, to all students. There is no judgment here. We are all wired to react to immediate gratification. It’s human nature. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending), a person’s ability to delay gratification early in life is strongly linked to success later in life.
That last link is to a study published in 2018. Similar studies are done each year. The most famous exploration of this theory is probably the “marshmallow test” first conducted in 1972:
That video documents a recreation of the original experiment, and it makes the conclusions obvious. We all feel like those children, to some extent, every time we face a test of our self-control.
Of course, the marshmallow test isn’t a perfect study. It’s more useful as a metaphor: We all struggle with delayed gratification, and we all benefit from self-control. That might be no more obvious than in school, where traditional grading doles out a reward or punishment almost immediately. School weaponizes that desire for immediate gratification. Students are trained early on to motivate themselves in reaction to threats and prizes, so to speak.
Experimentation and risk are more difficult habits to develop in that kind of Skinner box. And it seems that what students learn most in the system is how to game that system:
Her story is common in a system built on instant gratification. What’s less common is how honest and self-aware Elif Koc is in detailing how the pursuit of grades — of instant gratification — forced her to be dishonest and insincere about her learning.
What does grade abatement do to combat this? First, it delays the score enough that students need perspective and self-awareness to make sense of the number. Second, it bases that score on profiles, and the profiles on objective evidence of universal skills and traits. Third, it lets students make their learning choices in an environment of ongoing, collaborative feedback. The elimination of the immediate grade moves all stakeholders into a better state of mind, psychologically and academically.
New Numbers
It’s also very much about using the traditional, 100-point number system in a new way. Those scores can’t be eliminated from public education, which means we’re always going to end the assessment process with a number.
I recognize, by the way, that there needs to be systemic change, but it’s nearly impossible to believe there will be systemic change. The system is too bloated with mandates and political money, and that all happens far away from the frontlines. So it’s about using the lingua franca here — 100-point grades — and forcing those numbers to mean something different. We can abate the toxic effect of grades by gutting them and building in more authentic and meaningful machinery.
And we can do that because the surface-level heuristic can stay. High scores indicate success in ways we all agree matter; low scores indicate failure in ways we all agree matter. What changes is the specific feedback the number conveys to folks willing to invest in unpacking it. Low-information stakeholders still receive useful feedback, but high-information users are able to unpack a GAP score precisely and consistently. That’s what even this early guide explains. There is no black-box logic.
What’s most interesting, actually, is that the guide hyperlinked in that last paragraph makes the mistake of leaning too much into the heuristic. The profile indicated for a GAP score of 10, for instance, which was converted into a gradebook score of 100, isn’t clear or actionable. It indicates only that a 100 is perfection, which makes the pursuit of a 100 the pursuit of perfection. The sixth section of notes from this update talk about why that had to change.
We can’t base our reasoning and feedback on the number. The final number is, instead, code for the more meaningful and consistent profile. That’s the most important thing: The score is what unlocks other, more useful feedback. The score can be unpacked into a profile, and the language of that profile is precise enough to be unpacked and connected directly to the universal skills and traits we value.
Then it’s a simple matter of going over the formal work that was assigned, the informal steps taken to finish that work, and the collaborative, metacognitive, and individualized efforts we can identify and corroborate. All of that evidence-gathering is made 100% transparent through Google Classroom, the instructional website, and many other online and interstitial mechanisms.
Which means that a student’s accurate GAP score every few weeks provides actionable feedback all by itself. There is other feedback, of course, but the number is now useful. To an extent, we’ve turned the system against itself; the number now tells us something consistent and actionable, which means it should lose most of its Skinner-box shock.
Moreover, any stakeholder can use that number to enter the learning environment, because there is no weighting, no shifting percentages, no question of how many points were lost here or there. The number tells us exactly how to decode the experience.
What’s It Take?
What’s it take to implement grade abatement? For students, it really only requires accepting the idea that the score is based on evidence. There is nothing subjective about it. Errors in collecting or reporting evidence will occur, but those can be fixed; this is a fact-finding mission, not an argumentative one.
Each profile corresponds to a period of time, and we want a clear, collaborative assessment of that period. It takes self-awareness and amenability to do that:
Discrepancies between a student’s self-assessment and their actual profile happen because of human nature. It is human nature to avoid uncomfortable truths. The Dunning-Kruger effect happens for almost all of us at some point in our lives:
For others, it’s a constant battle against imposter syndrome:
That’s why grade abatement leans on Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” We are after truth, nothing else. The profile and its attached number have to tell us that truth, because that is the only way we can continue to grow and learn. If we could eliminate numbers entirely from the equation, that would be perfect; because we can’t, we have to weaponize those numbers as another way of confronting our assumptions, our expectations, our egos, and our fears.
This is also why the delay between the work students do and a score is such a critical delay. It’s no longer about immediate reward or punishment. Learning is now about each choice, the context of that choice, and the student’s ability to understand and react to that choice. This quotation, from the first guide to grade abatement, puts it like so:
The ugly parts of us don’t operate on a switch. Apathy, disrespect, entitlement—these aren’t sweaters or jackets you can shrug off and cast aside when you’re tired of wearing them. That stuff will stick to you, stay with you, for a long time. When you choose not to work, you are breeding future selves, developing right now the habits that will poison or empower you in every aspect of your life. Your daily life is inculcation in its purest form: the linking together of a chain of decisions that will protect you or drag you down.
This is not some dire jeremiad, either, about your generation. You are probably—hopefully—never going to experience the effects of a sudden and obliterating choice. You should be much more concerned with the small, insidious, and irrevocable ones that you make each day, each period, and each moment. In fact, we could sum this up
with a borrowed Orwellian metaphor:Do you truly believe that disrespect, disengagement, or failure now will pass through you like a grain of corn
through the body of a bird, undigested and harmless?
That’s from Part III of that guide, which is worth reading in full, and not just because it’s the first attempt at codifying grade abatement. It’s also worth seeing that the early guides were written for college-level classes, which makes them somewhat less accessible to all levels now. There is also a more negative tone at work in the writing. Because it’s not just about “disrespect, disengagement, or failure”; the good choices we make build up over time, too, and make us into better versions of ourselves. Those good choices matter. The true purpose of a Humanities makerspace is to build ourselves into better people.
Old Ones
I’ve mentioned “old” guides to grade abatement a few times. This process started with what Alfie Kohn calls “de-grading” back in 2010, so there are hundreds of essays, handouts, posts, etc., about grade abatement. Every iteration is instructive, and most of the philosophical and even practical components have stayed the same over time. This is, to a large extent, about the evolution of the idea, not just its current form.
This history is probably most useful as a guide for how to shift away from traditional assessment. It contains attempts to counter misinformation, for instance, like this early explainer that was written for interested stakeholders. I don’t know that it’s necessary for every stakeholder to invest their time into reading all of it, but there’s value in the process. With that in mind, the materials below weave together a picture of what grade abatement does and doesn’t do.
These three guides are somewhat outdated, but they’re also foundationally important:
▸ Grade Abatement Explained
▸ Grade Abatement Clarified
▸ Grade Abatement Amended
This essay, which is formally a series of connected explanations, remains almost entirely applicable to the current version of grade abatement:
The previously mentioned “release notes” essay also remains almost entirely applicable:
The following post is specifically focused on one scoring panel in 2017, but it’s discussion of how we assess interstitial learning is critical:
The following two posts are examples of iterative assessment and changes over time — i.e., of how grade abatement has changed in response to feedback and student needs:
That last one is a likely candidate for a complete rewrite. We need a static place for questions about grade abatement.
Here is another post that, while locked in time to a particular set of expectations and a particular set of students, provides a good example of what we continue to do:
We could continue for a while, unearthing old posts and essays, but we’ll end here, with a particular detailed look at how much evidence goes into every profile:
That post has a wealth of data — really, just an ungodly amount of it — as an example of how deep the assessment process can and often does go. That’s also the post to read for a sense of the potential for responsive feedback. When a student asks for it or needs it, that’s the level of feedback available; and as this post carefully details, that kind of student investment and student responsibility is critical
In fact, responsiveness might be the operative word for grade abatement. A stakeholder who reads only the TL;DR at the top of this post would still be able to suss out a student’s performance, especially with the importance placed on in-class focus and feedback. But the more any stakeholder invests in learning about the process, the more the learning environment will open up. That goes for students, of course, but also for parents and other stakeholders.
This is precisely why an older version of this website used the term umwelt in its URL: Each individual experiences the same environment in different ways, and that is by design. (Read more about the concept of umwelt here, through the medium of a particular smart webcomic: 1037: Umwelt – explain xkcd.) The folks who push themselves to learn more do learn more. Grade abatement honors that without requiring it of all students.
And since I always link to Alfie Kohn in these explanations, here is another article on the subject. Head to Google for more. There are plenty, because the toxicity of grades is among the most obvious problems in public education. ↩
