Ungrading with friends

Or: What to do in a complex, massive enrollment undergraduate project course that you have limited control over after you’ve seen the light?

My recent experience with ungrading left me convinced. It led to such great discussions and – above all – a trusting, and more safe environment for me and my students (an experience that I wrote about here). I never want to go back to grading. This september, however, I have to go back. The course where I took an ungrading approach is relatively small (90 students), and I teach it pretty much by myself. In other words, I have complete freedom to teach it as I see fit. At the start of the new academic year, I teach a truly massive course together with a dozen or so colleagues. I am not the responsible (lead) teacher for the course. The teacher who is, is not on board for ungrading. And even grading less or differently is difficult, because the teaching team is not fully known yet and I cannot organize – for instance – a series of meetings or workshops where we discuss our assessment practice.

We’ve just started preparing for the next year, so I want to try to get some of my thoughts, questions, and ideas down on paper (in pixels?).

About the course

The course in question is WB1641 ‘Mechanical Engineering Design Project’. It runs in the first quarter of the first year of the BSc programme Mechanical Engineering.

The course has two parts. The first is a lecture series with weekly exercises and a final exam about basic mechanical principles and analysis methods. The second part consists of a design project and a bunch of not-always-too-connected ‘individual skills’ like sketching exercises, an intro to Python coding, workshop safety, etc.

The design project is ‘my’ part. I set the assigment(s) and give weekly lectures on design methods and giving feedback on intermediate work. Those lectures are for all 800+ students together. Students do the project in 128 teams of 6 or 7. Each ‘cluster’ of 8 groups has a ‘project coach’ that they meet with every week. Some coaches have multiple clusters, so there’s roughly a dozen of them. There is large variation in their backgrounds, age, teaching experience, and in how well I know them.

In terms of the topic/content: students design little mechanical contraptions (a chain of marble machines). The project is usually quite fun. This video from the final day livestream gives a sense of the topic and complexity. (All lectures from 2021/2022 are on my YouTube channel, but they’re in Dutch.)

Asssment: Current situation

The group project is graded by the project coaches. I never introduced detailed rubrics for this, but I did make an assessment/feedback form that asks for the evaluation of 7 broad aspects/criteria on a 4-point scale (not present/insufficient, weak, good, excellent). The final grade is not calculated from these, but is given holistically. Or rather, that’s the idea. In previous years, a number of the project couches really wanted to grade on a more precise scale (asking for the return of a 5-point scale with a mid-point and/or checking the form inbetween two boxes), and/or making excel sheets that turn it into a calculation nonetheless.

A table with criteria to the left, 4 columns for insufficient/absent, weak, good, and excellent, and a column for remarks/feedback. At the bottom there is a single box for an overall grade.
Assessment form for the design project

Goals for next year

So, given all this, I don’t think I can be too ambitious. But I also don’t want to do nothing. I think I have three goals. I’d like to:

  1. Build in a bit more student agency and (at the very least) reflection for all students.
  2. Organize what freedom I can for myself to do more and more radical things in my section without too much discord with the others (and without too much extra work, I’m already swamped with work in the first quarter).
  3. Come up with a structure/way of working/assessment instructions that can support/will stimulate discussion amongst the teaching team about assessment and grading during the course. If I can’t practice ungrading as much as I’d want to, at least I can try to get people thinking.