Rethinking Grades: Arts Explores Ungrading in the Classroom

In the Faculty of Arts, a new approach to evaluation is gaining attention: ungrading. Rather than relying on the traditional letter-grading system, ungrading includes a range of practices that shift the focus from marks to meaningful learning. While grades can be useful for sorting or comparing students, they often fail to show what a student truly understands. Ungrading responds to this problem by emphasizing learning, growth, and feedback instead of letters and numbers.

Ungrading can take many forms. Some approaches range from collaborative grading and self-assessment to portfolios, peer reviews, or rubrics created with students. What these practices have in common is the belief that grades alone cannot capture the full picture of student learning.

Faculty have begun exploring ungrading in different ways, and as interest has grown, the Faculty of Arts created a Community of Practice (CoP). This group brings together instructors and staff to share ideas, discuss challenges, and support one another as they try out ungrading strategies.

Ungrading gained further momentum through workshops held last fall in collaboration with the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT). The workshops featured a panel of instructors from different disciplines who discussed their experiences with ungrading—the benefits, the difficulties, and lessons learned—as well as hands-on opportunities for faculty to explore different approaches and consider how they might use them in their own courses.

Early feedback has been very positive. Many instructors say that ungrading allows them to refocus on helping students learn. Students benefit, too. With less pressure from grades, they feel more able to take risks, try new ideas, and reflect on their learning in deeper ways.

Manager of Academic Support and Curriculum Innovation, Dr. Valerie Deacon, explains that the interest in ungrading is grounded in a long history of research. “We have decades of research about the harmful effects of grades on student learning, development, and self-confidence,” she says. “But much of that research originally came from the K–12 landscape.” What’s changed, she notes, is that university instructors are now engaging with these ideas in meaningful ways. “It’s exciting that, in the past ten years, university faculty have started to experiment with these practices and are sharing really positive results,” Deacon says.

Dr. Alyssa Counsell, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, has experimented extensively with ungrading in her graduate-level statistics courses. In her electives, students receive no numerical grades but submit mini-assignments and a large, scaffolded final project, accompanied by reflections on their learning. At the end, students propose the grade they believe they have earned, with guidance from Counsell.

Students were initially anxious about the unfamiliar approach, but that quickly gave way to enthusiasm. “Some felt they could pursue something different than usual and not fear for their grade,” Counsell says. “One student said they no longer felt judged by an expert but were instead learning from and alongside an expert.” In required statistics courses, she uses participation-based assessments to reduce pressure while students learn challenging programming and analysis skills.

The impact on her classroom has been profound. “Most students found the model transformative, reporting that they felt more comfortable asking questions, sharing challenges, and focusing on learning rather than performance. Reading student work was much more enjoyable and personal,” Counsell reflects. “I could read their meta-cognition—how they were assessing and thinking about their own learning. I wasn’t the ‘bad guy’ ranking and judging them.”

She sees ungrading as especially valuable in today’s academic environment. “It shifts the focus onto learning and process rather than a single output,” Counsell says. “Grades can incentivize shortcuts or even cheating, because if ChatGPT can produce something that gets you an A, why bother working through all the challenges and effort? Ungrading isn’t a panacea, but it removes part of the incentive and helps things feel more human.”

By rethinking how learning is measured, ungrading offers a more equitable and meaningful way to support students. It encourages curiosity, growth, and genuine understanding—all qualities that go far beyond a letter on a page.