As someone who’s always derived validation through receiving grades, I was a bit apprehensive about what the Uni English department’s new grading system would entail.
It was on the first day of school in English class this year that I learned that Uni English students wouldn’t be receiving letter grades on individual assignments anymore.
Often, when I don’t understand a certain topic in class and fail to see a reason to put any effort into learning it — the age-old “When am I ever going to use this in my career?” — the idea of getting an “A” is what gets me to do it. Conversely, when I don’t end up receiving an “A” on an assignment, I have trouble letting go of what I consider to be the be-all, end-all of my career as a student.
While perhaps inconvenient, and somewhat tedious, I soon realized this new system would help me let go of my internalized, romanticized ideals of academic validation and focus more on how to hone my writing to get it to its best possible state.
Regarding the English department’s new practice, English department Executive Teacher Matthew Mitchell explains, “There is no single system. The English department together is [experimenting] … how we’re doing assessment [with our classes]. And so everyone is doing their own system for their class this year and seeing how that works.”
All English classes have certain elements in common, Mitchell continues. Among other things, the English department is aiming to avoid putting letter grades on assignments and eliminating pluses and minuses in grades.
“We’re all doing some version of focusing on total points, which is known as a labor version. You are contracted to do the assignment, you complete the assignment’s requirements, you get points,” he says.
The “labor version” Mitchell refers to is a form of grading that’s been long-studied and examined.
According to Barnard University, “the course [using labor-based grading] typically has a default grade, which indicates that if a student does all of the labor that is agreed upon in the contract, a student will receive said default grade, no matter what.”
In Uni’s English department, the default grade is an A.
“My class was already almost in this place last year,” says Mitchell. “I read this article and was like, ‘Oh wow, this is something we’ve talked about in the office for years.”’
Eventually, Mitchell proposed his idea to the department, citing Uni’s lab mission as a main reason for experimentation.
Initially, I wasn’t all that happy when my English teacher returned my essay without a distinctive grade attached. I thought I didn’t have a good idea of where I was in the class and didn’t particularly want to revise my work as I was instructed to.
I didn’t realize I had become so dependent on grades that I couldn’t imagine receiving my writing without them; but as I drafted my next essay, I recognized that I had started writing for myself.
Not because I thought this was the work my teacher wanted to read or the work that would earn an A; because I wanted to better my own writing and improve on the foundation I’d built all these years in school. When I wrote, I was expressing my own opinions and using the language I was comfortable with, contrary to all my years in English class thus far, the classes I had been vying for and pining after upon learning about this new system.
I realized I craved the grade and wasn’t writing because I truly enjoyed it and because I wanted to learn — it was because I wanted to write whatever my teacher would read and think, This is an A essay.
Although I had been riding the high of receiving A’s for a long time now, those grades weren’t really doing anything to express the quality of my work or how I could improve my writing either.
“All grades were high in my class because I was so sick of [the traditional grading system],” Mitchell says, providing a few examples. “A-, B+. Occasional B.”
By using labor-based grading in English classes, students will stop focusing on what they think their teacher wants to see — instead, they will work for themselves and therefore be able to become better writers.
Consequently, labor-based grading cancels out the idea of academic validation. While I, myself, had become obsessed with grades, I soon realized the motivation had to come from myself. I had to write because I loved writing and learn because I loved learning.
“My main focus is to get people to focus on the substance of what it means to improve their writing,” Mitchell says. “The point of the game isn’t to give a score of somebody’s performance.”