The following is an expanded version of my remarks for the 2024 VASTA @ ATHE conference panel “Balancing Learning and Re-envisioning Assessment within Academia.”
Background
First, some ungrading basics that I’ve spoken on previously but bear repeating:
- Grades take focus away from detailed, qualitative (that is, useful) feedback. Telling me that my acting was an 87/100 is not helpful feedback.
- Grades can teach compliance to an external standard rather than creativity. Creativity requires intrinsic motivation and curiosity, neither of which are encouraged by grading.
- Grades disincentivize hard work due to their transactional nature. This is basic economics: it makes perfect sense to try to maximize one’s return on a minimum investment.
- Grades emphasize individual achievement and hierarchy over ensemble and community.
These grading basics lead to some implicit messages about the craft of acting. Stated this way, they seem absurd:
- Please make your acting 13% better to be perfect.
- Compliance and homogeneity…excellent!
- You can check the boxes to an acting career.
- It’s all about being the best actor up there. Don’t pay attention to the others.
My current ungrading practices can be found in this document: Sortore Grading Practices
What is My Role as an Actor Educator?
I have an aesthetic when it comes to professional actors. I think good actors are smart, creative, capable, and emotionally intelligent. I’m not interested in the super-puppet; I want collaborators. Bearing that in mind, what is my role as an actor educator?
I don’t think actor education is simply job-skills training, but even if I was only interested in industry-focused career prep, I can tell you this: There are some actors I don’t want to hire for my next professional project:
- The “Just tell me what to do” actor
- The “Everybody look at me!” actor
- The “I need it to hurt” actor
To them, and to my students, I say:
“I’m not your boss, and I’m not your parent. And I’m not interested in punishing you.”
Rather, as an adult educator, I want to be a collaborator, a mentor, and a healthy role model. I suppose that’s a sort of educational aesthetic.
Ungrading and the “Just Tell Me What To Do” Actor
The “Just tell me what to do” actor doesn’t have access to their creative impulses. They want to be given step-by-step instructions for their job. They are the professional equivalent of the “Will this be on the test?” student. As an educator, it’s my job to help this actor become a collaborator in their own art-making.
Many of us call ourselves “actor trainers”, but my hope is that student actors will engage critically with a creative educational process, not simply complete a training. I’m not trying to put actors on a Ford assembly line, regardless of how the industry may try to operate. I don’t care about actors booking meaningless work just to book work. That’s a privileged, artsy stance and I’ll own it. I don’t begrudge actors jobs that are just jobs, but I myself am not an expert in the hustle, so I can’t offer good training in it. It’s just not my lane.
For me, critical engagement with the art and process of acting hinges on intrinsic motivation. I can’t teach acting students curiosity about themselves and the world around them if they’re trying to please me. Taking grades off the table is one step towards helping students become independent thinkers and real artists, not just product ambassadors for their brand.
Ungrading and the “Everybody Look at Me!” Actor
The “Everybody look at me!” actor isn’t very good at listening and responding truthfully in the moment. They’re too focused on how they’re being perceived by others to focus on others. They are the professional equivalent of the class apple-polisher or brown-noser. As an educator, it’s my job to help this actor do their job without demanding all the energy in the room.
Actors who are hyper-focused on compliance may also be hyper-focused on validation. I don’t think that’s what professional acting is about. Much of the job requires solitary preparation, and the rest is about listening to other people. I tell my students,
“When you graduate, no one will care whether you are an actor or not except for you. No one cares if you submit the audition or not. No one is going to punish you for not practicing. So this course is a rehearsal for being a real actor. You have to do the work because the work itself is personally gratifying to you, because no one else really cares. People care about you, of course, but no one really cares if you’re an actor.”
If I can help students see the disconnect between the real job of the actor and the transient rush of receiving praise early enough, my hope is that they might begin to shift priorities, perhaps seek support in unpacking the validation thing, and move forward with a happy, productive college experience studying something that truly excites them from a place deeply rooted in their own passions– whether that thing is acting or not.
Ungrading and the “I Need It to Hurt” Actor
The “I need it to hurt” actor has a trauma-based technique (I might say a non-technique). That is a liability. As an educator, it’s my job to help this actor find a more sustainable technique, for their wellbeing and that of their peers.
My colleague Noah Drew recently made an observation that resonated so deeply that I will simply paraphrase him here. I’m always curious when an actor says something like, “I just want you to be brutally honest.” I understand wanting honesty, and of course I always aim to be honest, but where does that extra need for brutality come from? What is the self-annihilation tendency in some actors? Why do they want to be punished?
I used to say, “I’m not your boss; I’m not your parent; I’m not your warden.” That language is no longer satisfying to me, but there’s something in the idea that that “warden” might be the violent shadow side of what I mean by “boss.” The carceral dynamic is certainly alive and well in many educational settings. There might be a violent shadow to the “parent” role as well. Neither of those punitive roles is appealing to me.
Rewards and punishments go hand in hand. As much as I resist the idea that acting is about applause, I feel even more strongly that we must all push back on the trope that acting is about suffering. I’m not interested in work that is punishing to its creators. Creativity may at times require discomfort, and learning effort, but surely we can strive without self-annihilation. Surely there can be pleasure in creativity. Surely, as actors, we ought to play more than we suffer. I don’t see a sustainable future for our art–individually or collectively–without an underlying desire for wholeness, wellbeing, and joy.
When I first began ungrading in 2019, a large part of my motivation came from the suffering I experienced at the end of every term, when I felt I had to rank my students on rubrics that failed to really capture anything meaningful about them or the art form, hand down failing grades to students who were so obviously struggling with issues bigger than my course, reward students who dutifully complied with the assignments but otherwise showed no curiosity or spark, and make countless exhausting judgment calls based on an incomplete picture of each one of my students’ complex lives. It made me want to quit.
So I did, in a way. I stopped believing in grades as meaningful signifiers. What, exactly, did I think I was measuring and documenting? I decided instead to operate as if I were simply teaching public-facing acting skills workshops in a studio setting to interested adults. I stopped participating in the grading economy. I didn’t need it to hurt anymore, and I didn’t need it to hurt for my students. We really could just learn through play.
Ungrading as Acting Pedagogy
What began as an exercise in pleasure, however, quickly became something deeper. When I began I simply wanted a “kinder, gentler” way to deal with end-of-term grading angst (mine and my students’). I know many other practitioners have alternative grading systems that accomplish this in various ways. But over the course of these several years, my ungrading practice has become an integral part of the way I educate actors. Through ungrading, I aim to cultivate acting “soft skills” in my students: intrinsic motivation, curiosity, eagerness for feedback, growth mindset, collaboration, and communication. These are fundamental to the work of an actor. I believe that they are more important than my curriculum in voice and speech. A curious actor, eager to grow, can learn just about anything. A technically-skilled actor without intrinsic drive will face a very hard road indeed.
But Does It Work?
That depends on what you mean by “work.” The things I just listed are hard to measure. I may never know if ungrading teaches my students a valuable lesson in intrinsic motivation, because that lesson may not land until years later.
It’s complicated. I’m not sure. But the theory I’m working with is bigger than ungrading. It’s called “Expectancy Value Theory,” and it states that if a student understands the value of a learning experience and believes they can be successful, they will do the work. That means that, grades aside, if I can successfully articulate the value of an experience and show students that success is possible–even inevitable, as long as they do the work–they will do the work. I don’t have to bribe or punish them. That just makes sense to me.
I have noticed that I’m able to assign more work than I did previously, and the work the students do is better, even if they still skip assignments and miss class like they’ve always done. I like to think it’s because I’m articulating the value of the learning and helping them succeed better than I used to. Ungrading without diligence around educational expectancy and value would likely mitigate some of the harms of grading, but I’m not sure it would teach much. So yes, ungrading works, but not magically or on its own.
Most folks want to know: What grades do the students give themselves? My answer is: If I’m really committed to the central tenet of my ungrading practice (that grades don’t measure anything meaningful), then it simply doesn’t matter what grades they give themselves.
And at the same time, the students do inflate their grades beyond what they would earn if I were grading them. The whole point of student-led assessment is that the students actually self-assess. I have to ask myself: are they engaging critically with a process of self-assessment when they all select the ‘A’?
Evolution of the Practice
In the beginning of my ungrading journey, students tended to grade themselves on how good they felt about themselves in class. I try to cultivate a very positive learning environment, so that resulted in a bunch of A’s. I don’t mind entering all A’s for transcript purposes, and there are no consequences for me doing so, but I am bothered if I don’t think the students are engaging critically with a process of self-assessment. They are here to learn, and I want them to be able to articulate what they’ve done to succeed and where their growth edges are. I’ve successfully eliminated punishments, but in the absence of punishments, the students overwhelmingly choose rewards. Of course they do–the grading economy is still their native environment. Even so, I’ve been tweaking the system to try to encourage more critical thinking (and perhaps a wider grade distribution, though not necessarily) without backpedaling on the core values behind non-grade-based assessment.
Ungrading is a difficult transition for young actors who have come through a K-12 educational system that rewards standardized processes and normalized thought. In fact, ungrading is not necessarily “kinder” or “gentler” for many of these students. This is especially true at my current institution, where test scores are very high and students are highly acculturated to standardized educational norms. They arrive at my university because they are skilled at earning grades. They pride themselves on being good at gaming the system of punishments and rewards.
These students have taught me that they need scaffolding on the way to freedom. My biggest challenge in ungrading has been holding fast to my radical insistence that grades are meaningless without discounting my students’ experience of grades as meaningful. As conversations with my students about grades, power, motivation, and growth have become more complex, how can I keep my system elegant…that is, simple enough to be accessible? It’s a constant work in progress.
Since I introduced ungrading to my students in 2019, I have made the following adjustments:
- The addition of community benchmark norms. These are starting places for students to measure their labor and engagement and were inspired by Ashleigh Reade’s “bumper rails” (if I remember her term correctly now, which is admittedly slightly dubious. In any case, thank you, Ashleigh.)
- A visual, chart-style rubric of the community benchmarks, complete with emojis!
- An arrangement of community benchmarks that reverses the rhetoric of the typical descending grade order.
- Many students come to the course with the assumption that an ‘A’ is the default grade, and they simply have to avoid any penalties to retain it. This is anathema to a growth mindset. I like to emphasize that, if grades were to measure learning, everyone would start the course with a “failing grade,” having not learned anything new yet (despite the considerable assets every learner brings to the beginning of a process). For this reason, I list the benchmarks beginning with the lowest grade, and include the language “you completed the course as designed” with the top grade. Full success is possible (even inevitable), but only with hard work and full engagement.
- A request that students reflect on any discrepancies between their grade choice and the community benchmarks. Grade inflation is allowed, provided the student articulate how they are strategizing in order to meet community norms in the future.
- Instructor support: Benchmark Reports are sent to students at midterm and ahead of the final reflection assignment.
- “Practice Round”: Students complete a midterm reflective assignment identical to the final end-of-term reflection.
- Options for final reflection format beyond in-person meetings (written or media recording).
- Opt-In/Out: It is important to me that students feel included in the process of ungrading. I have recently come to realize that must include consenting to the practice of ungrading itself. While it is not my preference, I have added the option for students to request a traditional, instructor-assessed grade. Students may have understandably assumed that their university courses would operate with grades when they enrolled, so I feel my commitment to a consent-based space demands that I honor that assumption when necessary.
Acknowledging Privilege
Ungrading works…for me.
For one thing, my students do not typically make automatic, implicit, negative assumptions about my knowledge or competence based on my race or gender, so they accept ungrading as a novel scheme, not as evidence of my incompetence. If there is a bias that students have about me based on my visible identities, it is likely that I am a figure of authority invested in preserving institutional norms. My ungrading practice helps me to problematize that assumption. Ungrading is thus an asset in my teaching, where it may be a liability for some of my colleagues who face different stereotypes and biases.
My privileges also include an institutional culture that grants me a great deal of instructional autonomy. No one asks me about assessment. I am expected to submit final grades, but I am not expected to provide additional quantitative data or even to articulate course learning objectives at my university, a self-styled “elite” institution that values a “decentralized” approach to university operations.
This means that I set my own CLOs (because I find them useful) and define assessment in my own teaching context. For me, assessment is not the same as grading. Student “assessment” comprises a combination of expert, peer, and self-evaluation of student work with opportunities for critical engagement and constructive feedback. I also assess my own practice through frequent collaboration with my institution’s Center for Research on Learning & Teaching and a self-reflexive pedagogical praxis.