Ungrading, broadly, refers to a set of practices that minimize or eliminate traditional letter or numeric grades in favor of qualitative feedback, student self-assessment, and negotiated final grades, and it has gained real traction in some higher education writing programs and a smaller but growing number of secondary English classrooms. Proponents argue that traditional grading can distort the feedback relationship between teacher and student, since a student who receives a grade alongside written comments tends to fixate on the number and largely ignore the substantive feedback, a pattern well documented in research on feedback uptake discussed elsewhere in writing pedagogy conversations. Ungrading advocates believe removing or de-emphasizing the grade forces both the feedback and the student's engagement with it to become genuinely substantive, since there is no numeric shortcut competing for the student's attention.

In practice, most classrooms adopting ungrading do not eliminate evaluation entirely but rather restructure when and how a final grade gets assigned, often through extensive qualitative feedback and student self-reflection throughout the term, with a final grade negotiated collaboratively between student and instructor near the end of the course based on demonstrated growth and effort rather than a running average of individual assignment scores. This means the actual feedback burden on an instructor does not necessarily decrease under an ungrading model, and in some cases increases considerably, since the qualitative comments doing the evaluative work that a grade would normally shortcut need to be genuinely substantive and specific enough for a student to understand where they stand without a numeric anchor. Instructors new to ungrading sometimes underestimate this shift in feedback demands, assuming that removing grades removes work, when in practice it often relocates the evaluative labor into more detailed written commentary.

The model faces genuine practical limits in institutional contexts that still require a final numeric or letter grade to be reported, which describes the overwhelming majority of K-12 and higher education settings regardless of an individual instructor's pedagogical preferences. This means most ungrading implementations are partial, operating within a course while still needing to translate into a conventional grade at reporting time, which creates its own tension since the qualitative, growth-focused feedback students receive throughout the term does not always map cleanly onto a single letter grade decision at the end. Instructors managing this tension successfully tend to be transparent with students from the start about how the qualitative feedback process will eventually inform the required final grade, rather than presenting the two as entirely disconnected until a potentially confusing final grade decision arrives.

What Ungrading Actually Changes About Feedback Practice

The core practical shift ungrading asks of instructors is moving feedback away from criterion-by-criterion scoring toward more holistic, narrative commentary focused on growth, effort, and specific next steps, which requires a somewhat different skill set than writing feedback anchored to a detailed analytic rubric. This narrative approach can produce genuinely rich, individualized feedback, but it also risks the same consistency problems that unstructured, non-rubric-based grading has always faced, since narrative comments without a shared underlying framework can vary considerably in depth and usefulness depending on an instructor's energy and time available for any given student's work. Instructors who successfully combine ungrading's qualitative emphasis with genuine consistency often still use an underlying rubric or set of criteria internally to structure their narrative feedback, even while not translating that rubric into a visible numeric score for the student.

• Use an internal rubric structure to organize narrative feedback even when no visible score is assigned
• Be transparent from the start about how qualitative feedback will eventually inform any required final grade
• Budget more time for detailed written commentary, since ungrading often increases rather than reduces feedback demands
• Build in regular structured student self-reflection to support the negotiated grading conversation
• Maintain consistency across students' narrative feedback even without a numeric anchor to compare against

Making Ungrading Sustainable at Scale

The genuine workload increase that ungrading often demands, since detailed narrative feedback typically takes longer to compose than a rubric score with brief supporting comments, is one of the main practical barriers preventing wider adoption beyond instructors with unusually favorable class sizes or grading time. Instructors managing larger classes who want to incorporate ungrading principles, growth-focused feedback, reduced emphasis on numeric scores, student self-assessment, without the full workload increase a purely narrative approach demands, often benefit from a hybrid model that retains an internal rubric-based first pass to maintain consistency and efficiency, then builds the growth-focused narrative layer on top of that consistent foundation rather than starting every piece of feedback entirely from scratch. A rubric-aligned first-pass tool applied this way generates the consistent, criterion-based starting point efficiently, while the instructor's own time gets reserved for the genuinely individualized, growth-oriented commentary that represents ungrading's real pedagogical value.

For writing programs and individual instructors interested in ungrading's core insight, that fixating on a grade can undermine genuine engagement with feedback, but wary of the workload implications of a fully narrative, rubric-free approach at scale, this kind of hybrid model offers a practical middle path. It preserves the consistency benefits of structured, rubric-anchored evaluation internally while still allowing the visible feedback students receive to emphasize growth, effort, and qualitative next steps over a fixating numeric score. As more writing programs experiment with ungrading principles in response to genuine concerns about feedback uptake and grade fixation, finding ways to make the approach sustainable across realistic class sizes and grading workloads will likely determine how far the movement actually spreads beyond early, resource-favorable adopters.