Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) Free Audiobook Download by Susan D. Blum

Everybody knows that giving grades to students is a bad idea, but why is it so? In Susan D. Blum's Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) she talks about the consequences of grading students on a curve and how it handicaps students for life.

Ungrading is the act of marking a student's grades in response to a teacher's evaluation, but not the student's performance. It is "the ongoing practice of grading students on the basis of how much work they've put into their studies, regardless of how well they've learned." The word "ungrade" comes from "to ungrade", meaning to remove a grade entirely. Susan D. Blum argues that grading students for their effort rather than what they have learned undermines learning. Blum explains that when mistakes are rewarded, students learn from mistakes and try harder in future lessons. When only good grades are given, they do not learn 4-2-1 or make any effort to improve their skills because it will never result in a

Ungrading is a form of fear-based grading, where teachers focus on the relative success of students and ignore just how learning can be fostered. Instead of looking at the individual as a whole, ungrading grades them with some sort of marker that indicates their level of success or failure. This process tends to stifle any thought that individual students may have about their own learning. The authors believe in labeling and tracking progress - not grading - to provide students with valuable feedback on their progression

In the title text, Randall suggests that in order to learn and excel at school it is important to not be graded on a curve. In this comic he attempts to illustrate this idea by creating an environment where everything is graded on a curve, from learning to eating lunch.

One of the most widely used techniques in education is grading students, but it often comes at a cost that isn't worth it. When we grade students, we're not really engaging them in the learning process and developing what they've learned into skills they can use in the future. This is because grading relies on a student's final grade, which means that the teacher is deciding what a student has done to earn an A, B, or C grade.

Ungrading is a real problem in schools where teachers are afraid of losing control, students are disengaged, and students aren't learning. Ungrading can take the form of having students only get grades on the homework they do, or it can be done by having them only get grades on the quizzes they take. Most troubling of all is when grading becomes something that teachers do as a job, rather than something they do as a teacher.