English alum flunks grades in new book
Jesse Stommel compiles two decades of eyebrow-raising in Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop
It was the summer of 2023, sometime in June or July, and Jesse Stommel (PhD, English â10) had big weekend plans.
He said to his husband, âIâm going to write a book this weekendââa book about grades, in particular, and all the trouble theyâve caused.
It was a tall order for such a short period of time, no doubt, but it wasnât as though Stommel were starting from scratch. Heâd been taking a critical eye to grades for two decades and had published numerous essays on the topic, several of which had been read by tens of thousands of people on .
Jesse Stommel (PhD, English â10) partially in response to his realization that grades are performative.
âI was already starting to piece these things out in public and have conversations,â says Stommel, who teaches writing at the University of Denver. âThatâs how my writing process always works. All of my books are adapted from previously published stuff. This is because I don't think in a vacuum. I need to think alongside other people.â
All Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Stommel toiled away, editing previously published materials, organizing those materials into chapters, writing three brand-new chapters and then bookending everything with a by and an by (MA, English â05).
âAnd come Sunday night,â he says, âI had a draft of the book.â
That book, titled , was published on Aug. 14.
I can give you Aâs
Growing up, Stommel loved school. Grades, howeverâgrades he didnât love.
âI did really well throughout elementary school. I was super engaged,â he says. âThen I hit middle school, where I was being graded in the traditional way for the first time, and I got almost straight Dâs and Fâs in sixth grade.â
His grades improved the following year, but not by much. Being graded had sapped him of his motivation, he says. âAll of a sudden I didnât want to do any of the work.â
But things changed in eighth grade, thanks to his dad and brother.
âThey bet me I couldnât get straight Aâs,â he says. âAnd so, the first semester of eighth grade, I got straight Aâs.â
His teachers couldnât believe it. They were flummoxed, and perhaps a little suspicious. How could he turn things around so quickly? What on earth was going on?
âThey sat me down and asked me what had happened, and I told them about the bet,â says Stommel.
Yet that meeting opened his eyes more than it did his teachersâ, he says, because it led him to the realization that grades were performative, character traits of a role he was being asked to play. âIf what you want is Aâs,â he recalls thinking, âI can give you Aâs.â
This discovery, and the good grades that arose therefrom, freed Stommel up, he admits, relieving him of the pressure and judgment that often came with Dâs and Fâs. But it also made him aware of the stakes involved in the pursuit of high marks, stakes he continues to think about to this day.
âWhenever I see a perfect grade point average, what that represents to me is a willingness to compromise yourself, because that's what we're constantly expected to do in traditional grading systems.â
âWhenever I see a perfect grade point average, what that represents to me is a willingness to compromise yourself, because that's what we're constantly expected to do in traditional grading systems,â says Jesse Stommel.
From grader to ungrading
Stommel began his teaching career as a grader, evaluating the work a professor had assigned to students.
âThe experience of doing nothing but grading gave me an interesting perspective on what grading is and how it works,â he says. âIt had nothing to do with the relationship between me and students. It was just this abstraction of their work and the quality of their work, as though that can be separated from who they are and who I am.â
Stommel wanted to do something different when he became an instructor of record. But what?
His first source of inspiration was CU Boulder English Professor , who taught Stommel a total of four times, twice when Stommel was an undergraduate and twice when he was a graduate student.
âI really admired Martyâs approach. He didnât put grades on individual work. Instead, he had students grading themselves and writing self-reflections.â
Stommel also found inspiration in CU Boulder English Professor R L Widmann, with whom he co-taught courses on Shakespeare. Widmann encouraged Stommel to think of assessment not as a judgment laid down from on high but as a conversation between student and teacher.
âShe would develop deep relationships with students and then be able to tell them exactly what they needed to hear at exactly the moment they needed to hear it. And they trusted her.â
Stommel combined Bickmanâs and Widmannâs approaches in his own classes, along with what he learned about teaching and learning from books like John Holtâs and Paulo Freireâs . And thus ungrading, which Stommel defines as âraising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice,â was born.
But thatâs not to say Stommel believes his ungrading practice is the only viable option. Not even close. In his essay a revised and expanded version of which appears in Undoing the Grade, he provides a smorgasbord of options for the ungrading-curious, including grading contracts, portfolios, peer assessment and student-made rubrics.
The goal of ungrading, he says, is not to replace one uniform approach to assessment with another. Itâs for educators to develop an approach that best fits them and their students.
âThe work of teaching, the work of reimagining assessment, is necessarily idiosyncratic.â
Myths and paradoxes
But in a world without grades, wouldnât academic standards fall? Wouldnât students lose motivation? Wouldnât they be rewarded for learning less?
The experience of doing nothing but grading gave me an interesting perspective on what grading is and how it works. It had nothing to do with the relationship between me and students. It was just this abstraction of their work and the quality of their work, as though that can be separated from who they are and who I am.â
Questions like these, Stommel says, reflect the cultural anxiety surrounding grades. And while itâs important to remember that this anxiety is itself realââItâs based in real feelings that we have as human beings,â says Stommelâitâs equally important to remember that the problems from which it stems may not be.
Take grade inflation, or the awarding of higher grades for the same quality of work over long periods of time, as an example. Like , author of , Stommel calls grade inflation a myth, but he also believes concern over it points to a real phenomenon: the desire for education to be taken seriously.
âWe're seeing all kinds of pushes on the education sector,â he says. âPeople are saying that education isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing, or itâs actually doing harm.â
That many teachersâ jobs lack stability, especially in higher education, doesnât help, Stommel adds.
âWhen you see the utter precarity of educatorsâwhere most educators are not making a living wage; where 70% of educators in higher education are adjunct or on one-year contracts, sometimes even on one-semester contracts. When you see all of that happening, there is a desire to have some relief. And I think thatâs when we talk about something like grade inflation.â
Nevertheless, Stommel argues, the claim that lower grades means better teaching is a misleading one. High standards and high grades are not mutually exclusive.
Stommel cites a former student to prove it. âJesseâs class was one of the hardest Iâve taken in my life,â this student wrote of one of Stommelâs classes. âIt was an easy âA.ââ
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