Reflections on Ungrading in Small Chemistry Classes
/In the Fall of 2019 I tried ungrading in my upper-level courses (Analytical Chem and Junior Chem Seminar). I wrote up a short reflection on the semester for my annual portfolio, then made at least two attempts (in Jan and Feb) to put thoughts into words for a blog post here, but I didn't post either of them.
See, a lot happened in 2020. TL;DR: new (preemie) baby, maternity leave, grant struggles, pandemic, J Chem Ed paper published, staff furloughs & layoffs, new (1-year) university president, teaching from home without daycare for kids, new science building opened, faculty cuts, tenure decisions suspended, suuuper low faculty morale, and a fall semester without breaks. Like I said: a lot.
But I was reading Twitter this weekend and watching CJ (@DrCJSobers), Rissa (@RissaChem), and Teresa (@drbixby) discuss challenges, limitations, and implementations of ungrading, and I decided it's past time for me to move my ungrading thoughts from my paper scribbles to the digital space.
Context
To start, I think it's important to know the situation. As with so many things pedagogical, your mileage may vary, and the context definitely influences what's practical, or even possible.
The Setting: I teach at a small university, in the College of Arts and Sciences. There are no graduate programs in my college (but both of the other colleges have masters and doctoral programs). My department has five full time faculty, and some sections of lab are taught by adjuncts. We have a small handful of chem and biochem majors (BA and BS of each), so between the small number of majors and the small number of faculty, we teach some of the upper level courses in alternating years. Even so, upper-level classes are small. Fall 2020 was the first time we had TAs, and then only for the intro lab courses.
The Courses: Analytical Chemistry is a 4-credit course for chem & biochem majors (and in theory, minors), and a prerequisite for Instrumental Analysis (required for BS majors, elective for BA majors). The prerequisite for the course is the two-semester sequence for our introductory chemistry for majors (Chemical Principles). Analytical traditionally has had 3 hours of lecture (usually in two 1 1/2 hour blocks) and 4 hours of lab (one 4-hour block). The students in the class are usually juniors and seniors; occasionally a sophomore will take it "early." Junior Chemistry Seminar is a 1-credit seminar course for chem & biochem majors that meets 1 hour per week. It is part of a 3-course sequence (Chemical Literature, Junior Chemistry Seminar, Senior Seminar) that highlights skills that aren't specific to a particular division of chemistry, like reading journal articles, writing proposals, and giving presentations. We also discuss professional ethics in these courses.
The Classes: In Fall 2019, Junior Seminar had just 3 students. Those three, along with five others, formed the Analytical Chemistry class. (Yep, small classes.) We had some issues* with room availability, so instead of Analytical meeting three times per week (2 lecture blocks + 1 lab block), class met twice per week (2 longer studio-style blocks). Junior Seminar didn't even get a classroom. We met at a conference table in the shared space near my office.
My Ungrading Approach
I had been considering ungrading for quite a while before I actually tried it. In May 2019 I was a panelist in a campus workshop discussion about grading. I talked about a variety of grading (and, more broadly, assessment) strategies I had tried (various weighting schemes, big bucket o' points, completion-only assignments, an oral exam with questions based on a rubric of mastery levels, etc.), and others I had read about (specifications grading, standards-based grading, etc.). I told the audience that I was planning to try ungrading. As a tenure-track faculty member (finishing Year 3 at that point), ungrading felt risky. My chair has been pretty supportive of my experimentation, but I just didn't know what the Status (RPT) Committee would make of it. Saying it out loud at the workshop felt like making a promise: Yes, I am going to give it a try. (Our Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs was at that panel discussion and she said something to the effect of "ungrading is a legit thing," which helped me feel a little less anxious about it.)
When trying new things, I have a tendency to jump in the deep end. I could have made one assignment ungraded. Instead I made two courses entirely ungraded. I assigned no grades (except Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory at midterm time) until the final letter grades at the end of the semester. All feedback was formative. Due dates (aside from the end of the semester) were flexible.
Analytical met before Junior Seminar, and since every student in Junior Seminar was also in Analytical, I used time in Analytical to lay out my vision for (un)grading. On the first day of class, I set aside time specifically for a discussion of learning, grading, and ungrading. I asked the students what they thought it meant to get an A or a B. At first they equated A with perfection, but I point out that on a percentage scale, A's in our department usually begin at 93% (A- and 90%), and that's not a perfect score. We talked about course content and skill mastery, effort, and timeliness. I asked what they thought about this ungrading experiment - and I specifically called it an "experiment" that we were all participants in - and several students expressed some anxiety about having the responsibility of determining their own grades. One said they immediately thought they would fail. Another seemed to interpret ungraded as an A grade.
I promised lots of feedback. I don't know what it was frequent enough to start - at least, not in written form. We spent quite a lot of time in Analytical doing analyses in class - by design - so that they could ask for the help they needed as they encountered problems. I gave a lot of verbal, informal feedback through that system.
In Junior Seminar, with only three students, we were usually able to debrief at the end of each activity as part of class time.
In Analytical, I gave take-home exams that I then gave written feedback on (1-2 pages per student). I noted correct/incorrect answers and processes, and left comments about things like misconceptions and incomplete explanations. After Exam 1 I had one-on-one conversations with each student (during class time, but in my office) to ask how they each thought they did. I resisted setting grades for the exam, though some students tried very hard to get me to set a letter or percentage. ("So, would that be an A or a B, Dr. Haas?")
The feedback for Exam 2 was written only. Because of the timing of the final, they did not receive written feedback on that exam, though I made notes for myself about mastery and improvement. (I specifically included some final exam questions to test skills they had struggled with earlier in the semester.)
Labs were recorded simply as complete or incomplete, with notes in my "grade book" about correctness. Lab reports that I received promptly got written feedback. Some I received late enough that I couldn't provide feedback in time for it to make a difference in the course.
They sometimes asked for extra credit. I always said Yes, they could have as many "unpoints" as they wanted. It became a running joke, and they'd award each other "unpoints" for things too. Except for some time management issues at the end of the semester, everyone did all of the work (for Analytical: exams, labs, homework, class attendance - minus a few occasional absences), and they largely did it to a high level of quality.
At the end of the semester I asked the Analytical students to send me a reflection on what they'd learned during the semester and assign themselves a final grade. Some found ungrading challenging because they couldn't point to a particular number of points to earn to get a grade they were happy with. Some said it made them work harder than if the course had had grades throughout. Most students under-rated themselves in my view. One rated themself on the high side, and not by much. In their reflections, the students also told be about what they thought of ungrading. Some found it scary, others found Ig freeing. Some said it allowed them to focus on learning instead of grades. My heart sings at these words!
At the end of Junior Seminar, we took a class period (1 hour) to debrief the semester. I asked them about the course (structure, material, focus) and the ungrading system. They were very candid about what worked and what didn't, and how much they thought they had gained from the course.
My ungrading approach (and the courses themselves) were certainly not perfect. I could be better – a lot better – about the pacing of assignments and written feedback in Analytical. Since they didn't have grades like they were used to, I should have given them Exam 1 earlier so they could go through the feedback process sooner. Because of the way I scheduled the labs, they really had only one lab report submitted and ready for written feedback before Exam 1, which was about midterm time. This meant that for roughly the first half of the semester they had only verbal feedback, but then they were bombarded with written feedback (and I suddenly had a lot more feedback to give). In my next iteration for this class, I need to set aside more time for giving feedback – I don't think I consider that part enough when planning out a semester schedule. (My backwards design doesn't start far enough back, I guess.)
Caveats
The eight students in my ungraded classes knew me before the Fall. I had taught each of them in at least one prior course. One student was also an advisee of mine. All were majors in the program and most were at least somewhat active in the chem club I co-advise. They were all juniors and seniors, well settled into the ways of college life and the demands of a physical science major. All of these relationships and levels of comfort meant that I felt able to experiment and take risks alongside them. We started the semester with some amount of trust. I was not prepared to be so vulnerable to my first years and non-majors in Chemical Principles, so I stuck to my usual points-based grading system.
Grading and Ungrading Since Fall 2019
I found the contrast of ungrading my upper level courses and grading my introductory classes a bit frustrating. As so often happens, I was left wondering how much completion and timeliness really ought to matter, a sense that was heightened further in January when I read Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. I still haven't tried ungrading in Chemical Principles, though.
Baby2 was due in February 2020 (yes, I will soon have a 1 year old! Time flies!), so I knew I'd be on maternity leave for a chunk of Spring 2020. From all I can tell, every time a parent takes childbirth leave at a US university, it's like it's never happened anywhere ever before. There is no consistency, nor do the folks in the HR department seem to understand how ridiculous it is to stop or start teaching a university course midway through a semester. So until my leave began** I had a weird combination of course release to work on a grant and a single 1-credit class to teach (Chemical Literature, Part 1 of the seminar series mentioned above). Knowing I would hand over the course to someone else for several weeks, and not sure how ungrading would go over with my colleagues, I chose to use a weighted average grading scheme we'd used for the class before. When I returned to teaching after leave (shortly before the pandemic sent the state into lockdown and the university went remote) I considered switching over to ungrading, but I decided that my students were experiencing more than enough disruption without me changing the grading system on them too. Instead I made some required things optional, cut a bunch of nice-to-haves, and pushed several project deadlines.
For Fall 2020 I again used ungrading for Junior Seminar and grading for Chemical Principles. Ungrading worked well for the seminar course (again, a very small class). I'm still not ready to try Chemical Principles completely ungraded, though I'm currently considering ungraded assignments as part of a specifications grading scheme when I teach Chemical Principles II this coming Spring. I have a couple weeks left to decide.
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*Issues with room availability: That's an understatement. Despite moving class into a different meeting pattern so that we could have lab and lecture in the same building, we ended up not having a lecture space at all (short of standing for 3 hours at a stretch in the lab space). We commandeered the building's computer lab, except for a few weeks when a biology class had it reserved; those weeks we could spend the first half of class in the computer lab and then had to move to another classroom for the second half, but only after a computer science class had left that second room. I joked that we were a wandering class, and we made it work, but it is not an experience I want to repeat.
**When maternity leave began: On the first day of the semester I got a phone call that my latest ultrasound was concerning and Baby2 couldn't wait for the due date and had to come out via C-section by the end of the week. I spent the next three days running around town for steroid shots and blood draws while scrambling to hand off the work I had thought I'd be able to do. Kid1 was two weeks late, and my family history is full of late-arriving babies, so for Baby2 to be about 3 weeks early was quite a surprise. Baby2 spent a week in the NICU before coming home. It was a hard, stressful, anxiety-filled week at the start of what became a hard, stressful, anxiety-filled year.