On Going Gradeless
“No Grades” does not mean “no assessments”.
On the contrary, it potentially means much better assessments.
The primary reasons for moving away from grades seem, for many teachers, to be the following:
- There is a growing recognition that standardised exams do not do a good job of testing the things that we should actually care about in education.
- High-stakes testing causes high levels of anxiety in students.
However, this sounds to some like a compromise: We’re giving up our valuable test results, our rigour, for the sake of comfort, or throwing out a model because it’s not good enough without something to replace it with.
This does not have to be the case. Instead, removing the focus from grades actually allows us the freedom to design much more valuable assessments.
How?