This post written by Matt Brisbin originally appeared on APLitHelp.com and has been updated for this repost.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein

I want to tell you about an idea that has the potential to completely change the public education system in America as we know it. It’s something that I stumbled upon during my last year of teaching AP Lit, and it has profound implications for every classroom, regardless of the grade level or subject matter. 

But before I can tell you what it is, I need to address what has been holding our students back. It’s something that all teachers have to think about everyday. It’s an integral part of our job, and that is how we assess our students and communicate their progress to them. The problem is that most teachers rely on a system that unintentionally takes away from students’ natural curiosity, prevents them from thinking critically about their learning, and adds an incredible amount of stress to the students, not to mention their teachers and parents. If you haven’t figured it out yet, that system is the way we use grades in our schools. 

Two years ago I started thinking more about the influence that grades had on my students’ learning. It began when my daughter started kindergarten. She was nervous for this big change, but after the first week or so, I started to see a fire in her that I’d not seen before. She was already naturally curious about the world, but now her teacher, and her classmates were a resource that she had access to everyday that not only enabled her to lean into these natural curiosities, but encouraged her to do so. Her enthusiasm to learn was something that most of her kindergarten classmates shared. 

At the time, I taught 11th and 12th grade English, and I noticed that in the twelve years my students had been part of the education system, their fire, that natural curiosity about the world I saw in my daughter and her classmates, had all but vanished. Although the best students in our school still managed to enjoy the rigors of their education, I also noticed that these students were incredibly stressed out by the pressure to have good enough grades or high enough test scores to get into their dream colleges. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the poorer performing students were the most apathetic. Many of them didn’t care at all about what they were learning, let alone the grade that they received. Others cared so much that they were afraid to do any work at all to avoid the hit on their self esteem if they received a poor grade. The more teachers I have talked with around the country, and the more that I have read about the problem, it has become clear that this isn’t a phenomenon that is isolated to our school district or state. This is a common problem in public education all over the United States. So what happens during our students’ journey through the American education system? That is a huge question with many different answers, but one commonality for most of them is that their teachers start assigning grades to represent their progress.

So after a lot of research, conversations with students and other teachers, and with the permission of my administrators, I decided to try an experiment for a year and give up grading in my AP Lit classes. What resulted was pretty remarkable.  My students reported having less stress, the rigor in my classroom increased, we fostered a greater sense of community within our class, there was an increased focus on learning, and I was able to provide my students with more specific and individualized feedback. How did I do it? Don’t worry, I’ll explain it all. But before I do, it is important that you know more about why this shift away from grades is such an important one.

Grades vs. Learning

Raise your hand if you have ever had a student ask if he or she could retake a test or rewrite an essay. How many of you have had students looking for extra credit as the end of the semester draws near? How about late work? Of course, most of us take those late assignments or allow those test retakes because we’re holding out hope that our students have learned something in the process that will stick with them. That will help them do better down the road. We’ve fooled ourselves into thinking the simple act of taking the extra initiative shows a desire to learn and to grow. Unfortunately, what I’ve found is that the only growth that most of these students are looking for is the percentage in the gradebook. 

The sad thing is, I can’t blame them. I was the same way in high school. Our students have so much riding on their grades, it is no wonder why they have become more important to them than the learning they are supposed to represent. Without a high enough GPA, students will have a hard time getting into the college of their choice. Some students can’t even afford to go to college unless they get enough scholarship money to help them out. Of course, many scholarships are awarded to the students who have the most impressive transcripts. Parents are putting pressure on their kids to get the best grades so they can go to their dream colleges. In some states, students will get their tuition completely paid for at an in-state college if they have a high enough GPA. So yeah, students care a lot about their grades. As a society, we’ve designed a system that rewards these good marks so heavily that students have forgotten what school was supposed to be about in the first place: learning. 

Let’s Stop Playing the Game

I started talking with one of my students about this problem on day during my planning period. He basically told me that most students in our school didn’t really care too much about what they were learning. They would sit through any class, and jump through any hoop in order to get that “A.” The students with the best grades weren’t always the best learners or the most gifted, they were just better at playing the game. The longer we talked about it, the more I realized that this didn’t just have an impact on students’ learning. What concerned me the most were all the toxic side effects that came from putting so much emphasis on grades. 

So I asked my students about it, and it became all too clear that they were suffering. They were stressed out. They had anxiety. They were sleep deprived from doing homework late into the night for weeks at a time. Those who weren’t able to keep up, had fallen so far behind that they had either given up or were cheating their way through all of their classes. The students who stayed on top of their work were so competitive with one another that long standing friendships had soured as a result. Students who were naturally gifted slid by with as little effort as possible, and caused resentment from the students who had to work their butts off just to keep up. I realized something had to change. How could I, a teacher who claimed to care about my students, consciously put them through this? The good news is that I didn’t have to anymore. It turns out there is a better way.

Here’s How it Worked

As I started to think through a new system, my mind jumped to all the immediate concerns that I knew parents would have. What exactly do you mean you’re getting rid of grades? How will this affect their GPA? What are colleges going to think about this? These are legitimate concerns, and I knew that if this system was going to be embraced by my students, their parents, and my administration, I would have to design it in a way that didn’t impact any post secondary opportunities. I also knew that the only thing that colleges looked at was the letter next to the class on a transcript. They never saw an overall percentage, or any weighted categories in the teacher’s gradebook, just an A-F grade. I could work with that. As long as students didn’t see their individual assignments as a collection of points, the learning would still be the primary focus. I told my students that we had content standards that we still had to work toward, but I asked them about the ways they wanted to be assessed. What should factor into the letter grade that would go on their transcript at the end of the semester? Together, we decided on three criteria: Growth, Proficiency, and Work Ethic. 

Since I was required to enter a letter grade for midterm and final progress reports, I set aside class time prior to each one to conference with every student. I was worried about not having enough time to get through all of these conferences, but I found that when I did, they turned out to be the most valuable part of this whole system. Students were required to write a reflection about their progress and the grade they thought they deserved prior to our meeting. We used this reflection to direct our talking points during each conference. If a student needed more guidance on moving toward proficiency on any of the standards, we talked about the things they needed to work on in order to get there. This was a great way for me to connect with every student at least twice each semester, which helped me to build trust with all of them. Rather than a gatekeeper who judged their work and passed out grades, they started to see me as a coach and a mentor. Before changing how I grade, I would have never taken the time to do this, and I regret to think about how many missed opportunities I had to check in with each of my students and encourage them to keep moving in the right direction. 

Work Ethic

Growth and proficiency were easy enough to track, but work ethic is much harder to assess objectively. I asked the class to decide on some clear cut standards that would show that they were working hard. The most obvious measure was how many assignments had been turned in. They decided that an “A” students would have 90% of their work turned in by the end of the term. Some students asked me if I would rather them turn in an assignment on time or if I’d prefer it late, if it meant they were able to give it a better effort. I told them I’d rather get their best effort, but that it couldn’t be late all the time. So, late work would be accepted for two weeks following the original due date, but in order to earn an “A” for work ethic, 95% of the assignments that had been turned in had to be done on time. This was easy to track in our online gradebook. Every assignment would be entered as a 1, so the overall numbers students would see told them exactly what percentage of assignments were tuned in. If an assignment was late, I entered an “R” for recieved (which in our gradebook counts as full credit). That way the students and I could count how many assignments they had turned in late as well as what overall percentage had been turned in over the course of the semester. 

We also needed to account for attendance. Students were only allowed one unexcused absence for the semester. Any more than that did not meet “A” level work ethic. This meant that they had to be diligent in their communication with me, telling me ahead of time if they planned on being gone and making sure their parents contacted the school if they were home sick. We also decided that “A” level students should not have more than 5 tardies for the semester. Again, these are measures that were easy to quickly look at since our attendance and gradebook are all tied together in one online system. 

The last standard that we decided on for “Work Ethic” was that students needed to regularly participate and make good use of class time. Although this was going to be harder to have a clear cut measure for, I agreed with my students that if I thought they were wasting time or not working as hard as they could be, that I’d discreetly let them know during class. Each time I did, I kept a tally in my attendance book as a record. 

Proficiency

The first thing that I realized about assessing students on proficiency is that they needed to know where that bar was. Before this year, it was all about collecting enough points to get to a certain percentage, but now the goal was rooted in actual standards. So we read through them together. Each time my students submitted an assignment, they had to identify which standard they were targeting. I also had to have rubrics that clearly showed what was required to meet proficiency in each category. Thanks to the College Board, I already had a writing rubric and tons of sample essays for every level. On the nine point rubric, I considered a level six (6) essay to be proficient for writing. This was challenging enough for the students without making it unattainable for anyone. It also left room for the highest achieving students to push themselves beyond the standard rather than just settling for “good enough.” 

I scored their essays based on the 9 point rubric so they had a good feel for how they would perform on the AP test in May, but I kept track of all assignments in a google sheet and assessed them using a traffic light system (red=beginning, yellow=progressing, green=proficient). For each assignment that I recorded in the google sheet, I would fill the cell next to each student’s name with the appropriate color. It was easy to see how a student was performing just by taking a glance at the google sheet. It was also easy to look at their growth over the course of the semester. Each time I returned their work we would take some time during class for students to reflect on how they did, look at rubrics and samples, and identify what they needed to improve on. Students who were proficient or exceeding would identify the strategies they incorporated that helped them get to that level so that they could repeat their performance on a consistent basis.  

Update:  Since the adoption of the 6 point rubric, I’ve changed the basic level of proficiency to a 1,3,0. Although this is probably not an A level essay for a process essay, I made this decision knowing that most of the essays they’d write would be on demand.

The Results

Ok, I am admittedly not a big fan of quantitative data, but I also knew that if I wanted to truly find out if this grading system is worthwhile, I’d have to crunch a few numbers. The numbers were promising, but the real value came in the day to day interactions that I started noticing in my students. They stopped asking how much an assignment was worth and started asking about how they needed to change their responses to improve their performance. Rather than playing it safe and sticking to a formula, my students started taking risks in their writing. For the first time, I found them experimenting with voice and going out on a limb when developing an interpretation. Sometimes they failed spectacularly, and I always made sure to celebrate them for taking a chance. Rather than finding themselves in a hole because they took a risky approach, they were able to reflect on why it didn’t work so well and learn from the experience. 

Rather than competing against one another, we tracked the collective scores of the class and celebrated as we grew together. Instead of being jealous of the first person to score a 9 on an essay, the class jumped out of their chairs and celebrated. Because it wasn’t about an individual performance. It was an accomplishment for the collective group. Rather than being scared to seem too critical when peer editing, students were having informed and in-depth conversations about the nuances that would help them get to the next level on the rubric. 

I know, I know, you want to know about the data. Before I get there, and just in case the professor from my data analysis class in grad school is reading this, I should acknowledge that it is hard to compare students from year to year. Each of them is so unique that it is hard to pinpoint exactly why they performed the way they did. That being said, these students went through the same class taught by the same teacher, and largely completed the same assignments scored with the same rubrics, so it seems reasonable that we can compare the two classes on a general level with the understanding that this is a very small sample size. That said, what all the social science tells us about motivation is that extrinsic rewards like grades, tend to narrow our focus and prevent us from thinking in creative and divergent ways. According to the studies cited in Dan Pink’s book, Drive, if we get rid of these extrinsic motivators, it frees our minds up to function at a much higher level. What I found with my students, falls directly in line with this research. Those who started the year writing the lowest level essays were able to improve their scores months faster than the students from a year earlier. Students who started writing mid level essays improved at a slightly faster pace than those same students from the previous year. Finally, students who started the year already writing proficient, or nearly proficient, essays grew at the same pace as students from the year before. I believe that this is largely due to the incredible challenge of writing upper level essays on the AP Lit rubric. I also think that students who have found ways to be successful were able to do so in spite of the motivation of a grade. In other words, the most gifted students were able to set aside the grade as a motivator and were actually driven from their genuine interest in the task. However, these students still reported feeling all of the toxic side effects that a traditional grading system can have on students, even though they were performing at a high level.

As for their scores on the AP test, the averages were in the same ballpark from the previous six years, but one number that did go up was the amount of students who signed up to take the test. More than any year before, students who started out as lower level writers opted to take the test. Students who didn’t take the test were some of my better students, but decided against taking the test because they had already earned an English credit from AP Lang and their college wouldn’t give them a second credit for AP Lit. 

The Student Perspective.

As the year progressed, it became clear that my students really preferred this new system. Almost all of them gave themselves either the same grade that I would have given them or they graded themselves harder. Did I have to have some difficult conversations with a few kids? Sure. But what amazed me most is that every single student was able to tell you exactly where they were in relation to the proficiency standards, and what they were actively working on in order to improve their performance. This has never happened before in my 14 years of teaching, and it wasn’t something that I was expecting. The way they could articulate their progress made my principal laugh with surprise when she heard it. I also gave my students a survey at the end of the year to find out as much as I could about their experience. Here are a few of their comments:

Q: How has the grade-less system changed you as a learner?

• I have become less stressed about the AP test, and that’s most certainly because I am not having my GPA hanging over my head while preparing for it. I have also found that I am working more toward the concepts instead of each individual grade.

• The grade-less system has changed me as a learner by allowing me to see what standards I need to improve on instead of just getting a grade and never knowing what I did wrong. It has also changed me because it forces me to put in quality effort into my assignments rather than doing them at the last minute.

• It makes me responsible for my education. I almost feel more guilty if I miss an assignment or don’t do well on an essay because I feel this system is fair to me, so I need to respect and be fair to it. In other classes it’s easy to cheat, or skip assignments, because it feels like the system is against me and it’s my only job to get a grade at whatever cost necessary. This new grade-less system makes me a little uncomfortable because it doesn’t allow me to hack the program just for the grade, and it’s not me vs. the system because I AM the system. I recognize that this discomfort is beneficial and encourages me to grow more than a 100 pt. scale.

• I’ve challenged myself to dig deeper into my own understanding. With grades I know the bare minimum that needs to be done in order to earn a good grade, but with this system that isn’t even a thought. I focus on the meaning and lesson because I want to, not because I’m trying to play the game for a grade.

Now what?

My year using this new system has convinced me that we can radically change the face of public education if we can find ways to deemphasize grades in our schools. For those of you thinking that there is no way your principal or superintendent would support this, it is at least worth having a conversation with them about the need for a change and to help them see the toxic side effects that grades have on our students. Ultimately, you have to find ways to work within the boundaries that are placed around you, and there are lots of creative ways that you can work around the focus on grades. As long as you are finding ways to get students to remember that they are there to learn, and most of the time that means making mistakes and building on what they’ve already done. Create ways that allow them to do this without sabotaging their grade in the process. What you’ll find is that their performance in your class, and on those standardized tests, will take care of themselves if you can help them to focus on their learning. As I began this journey, there were several resources (linked below) that helped me find ways to start moving in that direction. I hope that they will help you to do the same.

This year, I’ve taken the system that I used in AP Lit last year and have implemented it in all of my classes. It is something that works for my on-level sophomore English classes, just as well as it did with my senior AP students. The system is also starting to gain traction in our school. This year there are three other teachers who have gone grade-less in all of their classes as well. The more I’ve researched the idea of getting rid of grades, I’ve discovered that there is a whole community of teachers who use this system around the world. You can find them on the #TG2Chat (Teachers Going Gradeless) on Twitter on Sunday Evenings. You can connect with the Facebook group, “Teachers Throwing Out Grades.” You can read the Teachers Going Gradeless Blog. You can find podcasts about this on the Cult of Pedagogy as well as the Things Fall Apart podcast. Finally, if you really want to go all in and give a grade-less classroom a try, the book Hacking Assessment by Starr Sackstein is a must read. Whatever your situation, I can’t stress enough the importance of beginning this move away from grades. Doing so could have a profound impact on public education in America. Even the smallest of steps that you make in your classroom can get us moving toward a learning revolution that I hope will become a reality very soon. I don’t want to see the fire in my daughter’s eyes or the eyes of all her 2nd grade classmates get snuffed out as they grow up. I want my high school students to love learning again. All it takes is for those of us who are invested in education to start the conversation. Together, we can make this change. 

Matt Brisbin has taught English at McMinnville High School, in McMinnville, Oregon, for the last sixteen years and has taught AP Literature and Composition for the last ten years. He also works for the College Board as a consultant and reader for the AP Literature and Composition Exam. He is a co-author of the Instructor’s Guide to the high school edition of the 2019 Norton Literature Anthology. In his spare time, Matt enjoys reading, playing pickleball, and spending time with his kids, Hadley and Axel, and his wife, Erin.