Degrade Your Teaching
Less is more
Early in my career, I encountered the bane of every teacher’s existence: students who completed assignments only if they directly affected their final course grades. I responded by attaching grades to more tasks, to communicate that every action, no matter how minute, contributed to their learning. To make this message more obvious, I carefully outlined each assignment’s pedagogical rationale and evaluation criteria in its instructions.
I also adopted a points-based method of calculating course grades, in which students could accumulate well over 1,000 points from all graded activities but needed only 950 points for an A. This system provided students with opportunities to experiment instead of punishing them for less than constant perfection. I wanted them to view making mistakes as an essential part of the learning process, not as a reflection on their worth as human beings.
While my intentions were good, the consequences were not. My courses eventually devolved into treadmills of busy work; for example, one included forty-three graded items, ranging from a checklist worth 5 points to a final exam worth 50. In a class of thirty students, that meant evaluating almost 1,300 student artifacts every semester. My other courses suffered a similar fate.
My constant assessment of students rarely generated any observable improvements in their analytic or writing abilities by semester’s end. Students who excelled at meeting deadlines and conforming to rubrics obtained A’s while those who didn’t got D’s or F’s. The once-common B’s and C’s disappeared. Despite the inflated grades, students regularly emailed me to ask why they had “failed” whenever the LMS notified them that they had not earned full marks. They sought to exhibit compliance with my demands but lacked any inherent curiosity about the subject matter.
The Covid-19 and the pandemic’s immediate aftermath made matters more difficult. AI chatbots, which further minimized the time and effort that students were willing to expend on reading and writing, only worsened my situation.
I realized that something about my teaching had to change if I were to avoid burning out, and last winter I hit upon a strategy that I’ve come to call degrading—abandoning the formal assessment of any task or experience for which the potential discrete gain in knowledge is likely to be low. Degrading and the more familiar practice of ungrading share many underlying principles. They both:
Regard learning as a function of intrinsic, not extrinsic, motivation. People willingly seek knowledge only when they perceive meaning in its pursuit, not when educational institutions tie it to arbitrary benchmarks.
Encourage risk taking by removing negative consequences for failure.
Shift responsibility for learning back to college students by treating them as autonomous beings with agency.
Acknowledge the reality that some undergraduates prioritize job preparation and recreation over intellectual growth, and that it is not a professor’s job to try to compel them to think otherwise.
Degrading differs from ungrading mainly in terms of scope. While the latter’s ideal is the absence of all grades, the former points to designing courses to have fewer but more informative grades. Iteratively discarding whatever assessments carry the highest opportunity costs—stripping courses of ineffective if not damaging clutter—can lead to desired pedagogical outcomes while still meeting institutional demands.
I took my first steps toward degrading last semester. I stopped grading oral presentations; instead, I gave ex tempore feedback to the entire class after students had finished presenting for the day. Rather than forcing students to produce a string of essays read only by me, they wrote for an audience of each other by annotating readings on Perusall. I cut back on testing students on factual recall, which shifted classroom discussions from performative demonstrations to conversations.
This experiment partially freed me from elements of teaching that I had always found tedious and distasteful. Less energy wasted on disinterested or incapable students meant less frustration. Teaching became a little bit more fun. While students were unhappy with grades that, in my opinion, better reflected what they had learned, I was not. I’ll be diving even deeper into degrading for the fall semester.