Last semester, when Introduction to Sociology enrolled 143 students, Dr. Kody Steffy ran an experiment. He used an alternative grading system, ungrading, and replaced exams with writing assignments that built toward essays for an e-book. You can see the e-book that resulted from students’ reading, discussions, journal entries, drafting, and revising, on Kody’s website. I enjoyed reading this collection, Lowkey Social, for the windows it gave me into IUB undergraduates’ lives. I was impressed both by the students’ courage in sharing vulnerable stories and by their sociological analyses. Kody spoke with me about how he designed his lecture course around this unique writing project.
What made you decide to ditch exams and traditional grades last semester?
In these high-enrollment introductory courses, I have a lot of pre-professional students coming with tremendous grade anxiety. This became a barrier to learning and to students engaging with sociological ideas that can be applied to their lives and fields. Also, I was looking for a challenge, since I teach this class just about every semester.
How did ungrading factor into your course overhaul, and how did it work?
Throughout the semester, we gave students qualitative feedback on weekly journal entries and midterm essays. We kept track of attendance. Students did a mid-term self-assessment, which we responded to. In the final self-assessment, they reflected on their work and performance on each requirement and then proposed a grade for themselves. We compared their self-assessment to ours, and we followed up with maybe 10 students where we diverged. For the most part, we were in agreement, which aligns with the research on ungrading—students are pretty honest.
This was my first time trying alternative grading. I didn’t know how students would respond, but I was very pleasantly rewarded. It took away both grade anxiety and the arbitrariness of traditional grading. It felt like a community effort. Most importantly, the students’ work was deeper and richer than what I would usually get in an intro-level class.
How did your teaching team prepare students to write the capstone essay?
The final project grew out of journal entries. With their drafts, first they did a peer review in their small groups, then anonymous reviews. After they revised, the teaching team read them, gave feedback to guide revisions, and rated them as “publishable,” “satisfactory,” or “not yet satisfactory.” If they stayed at satisfactory and had met other course requirements, they would likely finish the course with a B.
Just a few of the drafts sounded robotic, formulaic, potentially from gen AI. After getting our feedback, they completely rewrote their essay and created a much better product—the most satisfying resolution possible!
We devoted the last two weeks of class to working through the feedback they had gotten and continuing with revising their essays. In finals week, we read through the revised essays to decide if they met the publication threshold, which most students who tried ultimately made.
How did your students respond to your new course design?
The OCQ ratings were higher than the more conventional version of this course that I had been teaching. I also got some students who shared with me that they appreciated being able to focus on a meaningful project instead of working through a bunch of discrete assignments. Students liked having a wider readership—in this case, potentially anyone online.
There were, however, a few students with grade anxiety who worried that somehow I was out to trick them. I spent a lot of class time talking through ungrading and answering questions, which seemed to alleviate most of those concerns.
What advice do you have for other instructors who might be interested in adding a writing project to their course?
Make it a genuine opportunity to communicate, with a structure to motivate effort. I designed the whole course around this assignment: the book, the goal of writing an essay like those in the book showing a sociological imagination. Without the framing of “we’re writing a book together,” I don’t think it would have been the same. I also framed the course as a “busy-work-free zone” where I was trusting students to do their best work, which empowered them.
How can other instructors access your teaching materials?
Please email me if you’d like to see my syllabus, assignment instructions, peer review workshop instructions, or midterm and final self-assessments.
Consider how you can use writing to engage students in any kind of class, huge or small, by participating in Reviving Engagement with Writing Activities (11/5 at 1 p.m.) and Designing Writing Assignments You Actually Want to Read (12/16 at 1 p.m.). For more resources, visit the CITL’s Campus Writing Program.
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