Chemistry educators try ‘ungrading’ techniques to help students learn

Designing rubrics after midterms gave students in Linda Grabill’s class at Western Washington University insight into the grading process. “I had students tell me, ‘I’ve been studying wrong this whole time!’ or ‘I’ve been taking exams wrong. I hadn’t been thinking about demonstrating understanding,’ ” says Grabill, a physics instructor. As a result of these efforts, Grabill says, a large proportion of the students in her electromagnetism class began double-checking their answers during tests with an alternative set of calculations. This extra step would let them know if they had the right answer, something only a small fraction of the students in her conventionally graded classes did.