I Don’t Like Grading, And I Don’t Think I’m Gonna Do That Anymore

Over the last year, we implemented many changes at the Art of Apex. Everything from new technologies like our student blogs and portal site to curriculum changes like theme based teaching and TAB/student choice. The one area I (Ian Sands) personally have struggled with is grading. 

Read the Entire Post:
I Don’t Like Grading, And, Uh, I Don’t Think I’m Gonna Grade Anymore

Last summer I read a blog post by Joe Bower about abolishing grading. I followed the post to Joe’s website where I discovered a plethora of articles about not grading. As I read through each article, I started to question my own grading practices. Why did I grade? Was my grading informative or restrictive? Was my grading punitive? I didn’t like my answers.

I recently wrote an article about this for The Art of Education. Please click here to read the article and feel free to post any comments you might have at the bottom of the post.

 Next year I'm considering not grading their projects or their blogs at all, but simply  tracking student's work. Our grading software allows us to mark projects as "complete" or "missing" where grades go. When it's time to enter grades, I'll sit down with each student with a copy of this spreadsheet and have a conversation about what grade they think they have earned in my class for that period of time. Instead of grading project, or grading blogs, I'll simply give them a grade for the class.