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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>After I explained the theory and the method, they peppered me with many of the questions that other ungraders have also faced. “If we ask you, will you tell us what grade we have on a paper?” No, I answered, because I really won’t have put a grade on it. “If we decide halfway through the semester that we’re done revising something, will you grade it then?” No again, because I’m grading an entire portfolio, not individual pieces. “Will you tell me where I stand?” My comments on your work, and our conferences, should give you a good sense of how you’re progressing in the class.

I think the teacher dismisses the concerns too quickly. The reality is that at the end of the semester he will have to put a numerical grade on the report card ... and in this 'ungrading', a unscrupulous teacher could punish or reward a student by 'making up' any grade they feel like and the student has no recourse if they disagree with the grade.

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This is the same situation as any in which there are leaders who set rules and followers who have no say. Structure and guidelines protect the followers. It's the same as jobs where there aren't clear guidelines on time off, working remote, etc. Lack of structure is just freedom for leaders to become dictators. When there are clear rules and guidelines, then you're able to point to a violation and demand a solution. It's the whole reason society evolved laws in the first place.

I know this is the idea, but do you know of any practical case where a bureaucracy of rules and guidelines have ever been

(a) actually clear? and

(b) not suffered from the same problems except now encoded in rules that are even more difficult to change?

I mean, this entire thing about the grades is a great case in point: it's a bad system from the start, but it got encoded into rules a long time ago and now it's difficult to change it. You're suggesting adding more rules to fix it, but that just makes it even worse!

There is a middle ground between chaos and full-on bureaucracy and it's "not giving single persons so goddamn much power over other people".

With a healthy dose of democracy, you can collaborate on appropriate procedures without risk of enshrining unfair precedents into firm rules.

Yes, any of my several jobs that had clear rules and guidelines. I know what behavior is unacceptable and I could report a manager or director if I felt the need. I know I'm entitled to X days off a year and I have reason to complain if I'm not able to take that time off. I know how much my salary is and so on and so on. Regular jobs and schools will never be democratic because college students and employees don't have a direct say; at most they can encourage (within what limits their leadership allows) or quit.

If you enjoy being in an unstructured environment, that's great. You would've loved my first job. I hate it. The more rules and bureaucracy a job has, the more I thrive. I don't care about democracy, I care about living my life as simply as possible, and rigid, plentiful rules are my preferred way of living.

Is your salary also determined by a clear function of years of experience? Do you know what your manager makes?

Has anyone explained exactly how the number of days of vacation you get was determined? What's the process if you're unhappy with that?

I get that it's very convenient to have fair and clear rules and formulae for everything. What I'm saying is that in practise, that's not actually what happens. What looks like clear rules, once you dig a level deeper, rarely is.

In practise, the rules are almost always limited in their extent, arbitrary, and opaquely decided by the people in power in ways that disadvantage people not in power. Unfair rules are rarely changed or removed but generally just appended with more complex, opaque additional rules.

> Is your salary also determined by a clear function of years of experience?

No, it's determined via negotiation, which is fine by me. If there was a clear function, I'd be even happier.

> Do you know what your manager makes?

No, and I don't care, I just care about making as much as I can get away with and knowing what to expect. If there was some formula, I'd be even happier with that.

> Has anyone explained exactly how the number of days of vacation you get was determined?

No, and I don't care if they rolled a set of dice to determine it, I just want as much as I can get away with, and to know how many I can use. If they

> What's the process if you're unhappy with that?

I suck it up or find another job, which I'm fine with

> What looks like clear rules, once you dig a level deeper, rarely is.

Which of my rules do you think are unclear? I can assure you I take off the time I'm entitled to and my paychecks so far have added up correctly.

> opaquely decided by the people in power in ways that disadvantage people not in power. Unfair rules are rarely changed or removed but generally just appended with more complex, opaque additional rules.

We seem to be discussing different points. In settings like university or work, I don't care how rules are determined, I just want them to exist and be clear. You seem to care a lot about how they're determined, which I literally couldn't care less about.

>I mean, this entire thing about the grades is a great case in point: it's a bad system from the start

Is it though? It's not like it's only used in one country. It's been adopted globally by pretty much every nation on earth. I think the reason for that is that there really isn't any other way to do education at scale.

>There is a middle ground between chaos and full-on bureaucracy and it's "not giving single persons so goddamn much power over other people".

Which is why this 'ungrading' method is so terrible. It gives all the power to the teacher.

>Structure and guidelines protect the followers. When there are clear rules and guidelines, then you're able to point to a violation and demand a solution ... It's the whole reason society evolved laws in the first place.

Exactly. This is a terrible system because it takes away all agency from student to understand by what yardstick they were measured against. The teacher just makes up a grade based on their personal feelings of what this student 'deserves'.

Your grade in an English Literature class basically comes down to what grade the professor decides to assign you regardless of the grading method. There's no objective determination for what makes a paper an A paper versus a B paper, and plenty of people have stories about getting a C on a paper they thought deserved an A.

Yes, but you've removed the feedback loop that allows a student to adjust their output to accommodate their grader's wishes.

Not really; there is a literal feedback loop with the teacher writing comments/critiques, and the student responding to them.

What is removed is the ability to say "this is good enough, I am meeting expectations, and am confident in staying the class" vs "I am not able to meet expectations and should instead drop it with a W instead of risking my GPA". That said, I think as a student if I'd had a teacher engage with me this way it would present enough of an opportunity to build trust that I'd be able to get a feeling as to whether they were invested in me improving my work, and use that to determine if I should stay in the class or not.

>there is a literal feedback loop with the teacher writing comments/critiques

Sure - but words are ambiguous. Does the feedback mean I'm struggling, or is the feedback meant to elevate my already excellent work?

Here's any idea, why not give a grade AND feedback. This way I, as a student, know objectively how I did, and what I need to do to get better.

We had a teacher in high school that was universally accepted as being sexist. I took "Honor's English" (basically "hard" English for more intelligent students) with her in 9th grade. There were 3 of us boys in her class of ~20 or so, and we were all on the high IQ end of the scale and good students. The girls were a mixed bag, including some that definitely shouldn't have been in the "honor's" class.

They all got As and Bs. I pulled in the only Cs of my scholastic career. One of the guys got the exact same grade to the second decimal place on 4 papers in a row.

My personal highlights were getting told my Polyphemus' cave diorama (boy, what a good use of time!) wasn't colorful enough, along with the time she accused me of plagiarism in front of the class in the middle of my book report because of the vocabulary I used.

The sexism was so bad that the daughter of another teacher actually left mid-class to complain to the principal about it. Nothing was done.

The Honors Algebra II class at the HS my sister went to was the same way but it was girls rather than boys that she treated more harshly. Girls would drop out of the honors track to avoid her class. Math class might provide fewer opportunities for subjectivity to creep in, but it still provides plenty. My sister's homework was "lost" several times, and she was falsely accused by the teacher of skipping class (3 unexcused absences in a quarter was an automatic F).

The response by the administration any time complaints were made were "We don't comment on any teacher's methods, but some of our best students come out of her classes." Given that honor students went into her classes, it would be rather troubling if that weren't the case...

Unless I'm mistaken there's no indication in TFA on the topic this person teaches, which is very important in my opinion, because grading a science-related work is indeed very different from grading literature-related stuff.

Both teachers and students sometimes forget that grading is not a "judgment", but an evaluation of how much of the knowledge/know-how they are supposed to have by graduation, have been learned. To the point that sometimes you can get a "F for bad behavior". No wonder students are confused when you use different meanings of sanction with the tool.

FTA: "Some took my children’s literature class because they thought it would be a fun or easy way to fulfill the requirement."

Indeed; I was a somewhat ... ill-behaved student, and it was interesting to see how different teachers reacted to it. It always crept in a bit. One teacher I never got above a C on an assignment, so I swapped papers with someone who never got below a B. The paper with my name on it (which he wrote) got a D+, the paper with his name on t (which I wrote) got an A.

The most blatant was when an instructor told me to my face that no matter what work I did, the highest grade I was getting in her class would be a D. The class required a C to fulfill my graduation requirements. This was about a month into a 16 week semester. In retrospect she was probably trying to get me to drop her class, but I didn't consider that at the time (It was my very first semester of college and it hadn't yet occurred to me that dropping a class was an option).

Sure - but at least this is on a paper-by-paper basis, so your final mark is at least based on something tangible that you can refer back to. It also means you can instant feedback on how you're doing. Here, we're talking about providing an arbitrary grade at the end. The student has no recourse to argue the grade. The student may even have been blindsided.

background: I have tried ungrading in engineering courses, it freaks students out and tends to trigger process inappropriate optimization behaviors as opposed to learning orientation shifts...I've had better luck with a middle ground. overall statement of positionality - grades and summative assessment are necessary and important but are unrelated to creating learning, formative feedback is much more affective at creating learning.

exactly. Students are people with lived experiences and expectations that drive how they perceive things. A lot of times things that are 'theoretically' better in education bomb in practice because they conflict with students' emotional/psychological needs, wants, and expectations. There are NORMS and all this does is mess with the norms the faculty can control - but not all the norms. The most important thing he is doing is cleaving formative from summative feedback.

This isn't really a perfect with the underlying principles of ungrading...this isjust ungrading within the controlled climate of the course itself. Thats great, but the problem is his drive towards formative feedback over summative feedback is constrained by outside forces. There is still a grade at the end of the course and that makes it hard. And then add in that if too many students do well you get accused of 'grade inflation' (which is a whole nother ball of nonsense). Students KNOW there will be a grade at the end, to act as if there isn't is just introducing ambiguity not necessarily learning. You can bypass some of the problems with strong trust - but only some. Specific to the comment on rubrics, GOOD rubrics can't really be useful, self and peer evaluation can be useful, using the rubric to provide formative feedback can be useful. Revisions can be ESPECIALLY useful. But you can't truly (ugh...sorry, no true scotsman) within a typical university that demands I assign grades. Anything you do to try will be 'gamed' so the best you can do is make 'gaming the system' and 'learning' as similar as possible.

I would love LOVE to just have all of the classes I teach be taken as pass/fail but they aren't and can't be based on the external systematic rules. I've settled on a tool called 'specifications grading' as a middle ground that basically translates learning behaviors and outcomes into a clear grading system.

<3 this. For technical courses, where work can be objectively right and wrong, specifications grading, aka standards-based grading, aka mastery based grading, is 100% the way to go.

There are some "ungrading" practices that are useful, but the grade earned serves an important credentialing step, and clearly showing students the skills they need to master is the whole dang point.

two notes:

1) I would argue that most questions we are asking students in technical courses shouldn't have right and wrong answers...it communicates the wrong thing and reinforces the assumption that technical work is 'getting the right answer' for students. College level technical teaching should work beyond that norm towards using 'right answers' for decision making

2) While there are similarities and they are often used interchangably, standards based, mastery based, and specifications grading are not exactly the same thing.

1) Fair point. The problem-solving technique is the most important part, but from this physicist's perspective, there is work that is objectively wrong, and there is basically always a limited set of solution approaches and results that I'd consider fully correct. Making the leap from "right answers" to "right thinking for decision making" is the key indicator of the expertise we want to train, and it doesn't happen just by making feedback less clear ;)

2) True! You really have to be careful even within terminologies. There are lots of different implementations of mastery-based grading, for example, and they're subtly different.

And a final note: we're of dangerously similar (but not quite the same) perspectives! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANNX_XiuA78

Friend?

Yup! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ZUDtaGf3I&t=21s

> a unscrupulous teacher could punish or reward a student by 'making up' any grade they feel like and the student has no recourse if they disagree with the grade

Surely the second assessor would catch that though? Or the external examiner's spot-checking?

You want multiple teachers (completely disconnected from the actual class) to catch those issues? Isn't the point of this 'ungrading' policy to take in student context - which this second reviewer system completely upends.

I still don't understand why grading assignments and giving that (instant) feedback to students is so bad.

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