Why no grades?

As students, you are probably used to being categorized by your grades. Maybe you have been taught to be so focused on grades that it is one of your key identities (e.g. "I am an A student). I certainly was. I felt academic competition was so central to who I was, that I never got out of the academic track and couldn't see myself outside of it - and thus ended up as your professor. It might have driven me, but learning doesn't necessarily happen best in this system.

Grades weren't widely used in universities and public education until the 1940s. This might seem like a long time, until you realize that so-called universities have been around for more than 800 years. Instead, I want your learning to primarily to be focussed on, well, learning, not on earning the intangible academic currency called "grades". The competition inherent to "earning grades" often leads to poor academic practices among students– hoarding knowledge so that others can't access it, unwillingness to be collegial, and disdain for working together in case a slacker brings down your mark. I want us to work together, share ideas and practice being Historians/ Medievalists in public without fear of failure (failure can actually be a really good way to learn). So in the first term we are going to practice "ungrading".

And just because I don't care about grades doesn't mean that I don't care about how you are doing. Because of the tools we will be using and the small class, I will have more hard data on the work you are all doing than for most other classes I have taught. While I can't help but notice whether you are "in class" or not, the digital monitoring informs me whether you have done the reading on Perusall or not. I really care about you doing the work and gaining the learning that happens as a result.

Term I

While I don't really care about grades, other professors and, well, the university do. So it is perhaps ultimately necessary for you to get one. I want all of you to succeed in this course and it would make me very happy to be able to give all of you an A. I just need you to give me a good reason to do so.

The first term of the course offers you space to experiment. For the most part, I will read and comment on your written work, and give you feedback, but I won't give it a grade. Some feedback may by publicly accessible. Instead, you will be given advice on how to improve and better your work. You will regularly rate yourself for participation and at the end of term you will produce a "process letter" which makes an argument for what grade you should receive. Your process letter must take into account your classroom participation, your annotation record, and your overall work completed in the first term. A detailed description of the process letter can be found here.

Term II

The first term is an experiment. If it works, we may continue with a similar format, but this is something we will address in January together. If you choose we could return to a traditional grade based format, we could retain some kind of XP based system or we could move towards the Process Letter defining the whole shabang.