Why grade? Exploring opportunities for ungrading and alternative grading at University College Tilburg

Traditional forms of grading (i.e. assessing students’ work summatively resulting in a numerical evaluation) suffer a range of shortcomings. Studies show that in addition to reducing student motivation (Pulfrey et al., 2011) and negatively affecting well-being (McMorran & Ragupathi, 2019), grading increases disparities among students from different backgrounds and with different kinds of talents (Inman & Powell 2018). This goes against any educational philosophy that strives to promote inclusivity and wellbeing, including the philosophy of University College Tilburg. Therefore, the authors seek to ascertain whether we can adopt different strategies of assessment that allow for increased inclusivity in terms of student qualities, backgrounds, and growth.
In this article, we report on the findings of a literature review on the history of grading and three alternative forms of grading, as well as an exploration of their potential implementation in the context of University College Tilburg. Our main focus lies on the benefits and shortcomings of traditional grading and its alternatives. The results of our interviews show that both students and teachers of University College Tilburg recognize the limitations of traditional grading but do not see a need for a radical shift in our grading paradigm. We therefore propose smaller changes that can be made in our grading practice, such as making grading more transparent, giving students a bigger role in deciding what they want to learn, facilitating students’ self-reflection, and providing support via narrative feedback.