Going Gradeless

Assessment Research
In researching grading and contract grading, Ive found that its difficult for instructors
not to privilege their own writing construct, even when they try to give students
autonomy over their projects. Contract grading in particular attempts to negotiate
authority with students, often creating a hybridized system in which students receive a B
for quantity of work and an A for quality. This hybridized method recognizes two writing
paradigms: 1.) quality writing is a talent, not always the outcome of hard work 2.) the
quality of writing can improve overtime as a developing skill.

While these two paradigms are both true (or can be), when grading contracts value
quality of work over quantity, they reward students who already write well and therefore
limit efforts to restructure the politics of grading. Ranking these paradigms with quality
over quantity creates an unfair hierarchy, where students working for an A all semester
may never achieve A quality, even if they may be putting in more work than other
talented writers in the class. Further, instructors struggle to articulate what exactly A-
quality looks like, making the jump from B to A a matter of meeting ambiguous
expectations. Adkison and Tchudi say that defining grades is a rhetorical problem,
claiming that it is nearly impossible to explain what the qualities of an A paper will be
before students begin writing because writing quality is inseparable from the context of
writer, audience, occasion, and content (193).

Assessment Rationale
For the unfair hierarchy that the quality-quantity contract grading system perpetuates, not
to mention its elusive definitions of A vs. B quality work, I have created a quantity-based
assessment in keeping with Marcy Baumans argument that student investment can come
from other places besides grades. Bauman contends that motivation is contingent on four
qualities: choice, challenge, control, and collaboration. Students need to challenge their
ideas and be challenged in their thinking, but to invest in the rigor of writing, they need to
have the freedom to choose and control their projects. In Naming What We Know, Tony
Scott and Asou B. Inoue write: [W]hatever is emphasized in an assessment produces
what is defined as good writing in a class, a program, or a curriculum. . . Writing
assessment constructs boundaries for learning and student agency in learning
environments and frames how students understand writing and their own abilities (30).
On the connection between assessment and learning, Scott and Inoue concur that grading
sets the parameters for student thinking.

In Baumans quantity-only assessment, she finds that in addition to choice, challenge,

control, collaboration, there is a second motivation factor: writing assignments
themselves can encourage investment by requiring students to place their writing into
real, context-bound communications. This is where my class deviates from Baumans:
though I agree that the immediacy of a real communication implicitly creates investment,
I also acknowledge the difficulty of finding real contexts for student writing. I am
therefore reluctant to promise students that their writing skills from this class will transfer
directly into other writing contexts. I also acknowledge that if students want to write from
their interests or for their career paths, I will not be the content expert in the room. So
while students will have the freedom to write for out-of-class contexts, I will emphasize
rhetorical thinking and writing, grading based only on work that can be quantified before
students begin an assignment.

Course Plan
Quantity-based assessment in this course depends on fixed elements of process work in
the form of worksheets. These process worksheets will ask for specific kinds of thinking
and writing (summary, analysis, synthesis). This is where the pesky details of an
assignment will go (word count, source count, etc.), rather than in the paper. For every
writing assignment, students will complete the following worksheets:
Research Analysis: evaluating the arguments and supporting points in sources
Project Goals: outlining the kind of work students want their project to do,
including the kind of effect they want their argument to have
Rhetorical analysis: analyzing an argument similar to the one they want to make,
considering what made the piece effective
Drafts: showing multiple phases of their writing project
Project Reflection: reflecting on feedback from their final draft and how it affects
their next writing assignment
The final papers will not have word limits, source requirements, or rigid conventions.
Instead, papers will have fairly stable expectations such as:
An argument posed and developed throughout the paper
Relevant support incorporated to support the argument
Attention to an identifiable audience
Minimal use of summary, with analysis and synthesis the papers primary makeup
Clear connections between ideas, within and across paragraphs
Consistency in tone and style
Voice balanced with those in sources
For completing this work, students will receive an A.

Course Overview
Each unit will emphasize a threshold concept from Naming What We Know and explicitly
work to meet a different course outcome. In their chapter, Threshold Concepts in First-
Year Composition, Doug Downs and Liane Robertson suggest tying threshold concepts to
outcomes in order to emphasize the shift from learning good writing to learning about
writing (113). Incorporating threshold concepts into outcomes is one way to solidify the
paradigm shift, one that offers a framework for writing that lends itself to transfer.
1.) Research: For the first unit, we will work on developing credible research
practices, with the guiding philosophy that any informationwhen used
rhetoricallymight be used credibly in an argument. We will approach writing as
a process of making ethical choices, to include the selection, evaluation, and use
of sources. The paper for this unit will be a rhetorical analysis of two sources: one
scholarly, one popular.
Threshold Concept: Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity
John Duffy: [T]o say that writing involves ethical choices is to say that
when creating a text, the writer addresses others. And that, in turn
 initiates a relationship between writer and readers, one that necessarily
involves human values and virtues (31).
2.) Personal Argument: The second project will be an argument paper intended to
serve the writer, acknowledging the fact that Writing is informed by prior
experience, ideology, and identity (Lunsford 54). For example, students might
write to learn, researching a topic for the purpose of self-education. This paper
will make subjectivity or ideology explicit, an opportunity to discuss how the bias
of the writer is ever-present but often implicit in all writing.
Threshold Concept: Writing Creates and Enacts Identities and
Ideologies
Tony Scott: Writing is always ideological because discourses and
instances of language use do not exist independently from cultures
and their ideologies (48).
3.) Public Argument: This paper will develop with an intentional audience in mind,
ideally a narrow audience rather than the vague, imagined general audience of
web writing. Students must develop an argument to an audience, explicitly
writing with an expectation of response.
Threshold Concept: Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity
Andrea Lunsford: Such shifting and expanding understandings of
audience and of the ways writers interact with, address, invoke, become,
and create audiences raise new and important questions about the ethics
of various communicative acts and call for pedagogies that engage
students in exploring their own roles as ethical and effective
readers/audiences/writers/speakers/listeners in the twenty-first century
(20-21).
4.) Revision: At the end of the semester, students will choose either the Personal or
Public Argument to revise. They will conduct additional research, going through
the same process work procedure. While revision is embedded within the
structure of each assignment, this unit emphasizes writing as a learning process
that is never finished.
Threshold Concept: All Writers Have More to Learn
Doug Downs: To create the best possible writing, writers work
iteratively, composing in a number of versions, with time between each
draft for reflection, reader feedback, and/or collaborator development.
The revision implied in this processthat is, significant development of a
texts ideas, structure, and/or designis central to developing writing
(66).
Closing Thoughts on Course Design
The two driving features of this course, quantity-based assessment and threshold concepts
as outcomes, connect to the class mission of setting transparent, achievable goals. Downs
and Robertson say that structuring course outcomes around learning about writing is a
paradigm shift that students need time adjusting to, with some students possibly spending
the entire semester in an adjustment period (116). If students need time to acclimate to
key writing concepts, then assessment must accommodate this need, with quantity-based
assessment avoiding the contradiction of telling students that writing is a long-term
process and then making time-bound, quality judgments.
Naming What We Know introduces five Threshold Concepts, but I only work from 1, 3, &
4 because these three concepts address writing as a rhetorical (and therefore social),
personal, and never-finished practice:
1.) Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity
2.) Writing Speaks to Situations Through Recognizable Forms
3.) Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies
4.) All Writers Have More to Learn
5.) Writing Is (Also Always) a Cognitive Activity

Works Cited

Bauman, Marcy. What Grades Do for Us, and How to Do without Them. Alternatives
to Grading Student Writing, edited by Stephen Tchudi, National Council of
Teachers of English, 1997, pp. 162-180.
Downs, Doug. Revision Is Central to Writing. Naming What We Know, edited by Linda
Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State University Press, 2015, pp. 66-
67.
Downs, Doug and Liane Robertson. Threshold Concepts in First-Year Composition.
Writing Involves Making Ethical Choices. Naming What We Know, edited by
Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State University Press, 2015, pp.
105-121.
Duffy, John. Writing Involves Making Ethical Choices. Naming What We Know, edited
by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State University Press, 2015,
pp. 31-21.
Lunsford, Andrea. Writing Is Informed by Prior Experience. Naming What We Know,
edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State University Press,
2015, pp. 54-55.
---. Writing Addresses, Invokes, And/Or Creates Audiences. Naming What We Know,
edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State University Press,
2015, pp. 20-21.
Scott, Tony and Asou B.Inoue. Assessing Writing Shapes Contexts and Instruction.
Naming What We Know, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle,
Utah State University Press, 2015, pp. 29-31.
Scott, Tony. Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies. Naming What We
Know, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State University
Press, 2015, pp. 48-50.
Spidell, Cathy and William H. Thelin. Not Ready to Let Go: A Study of Resistance to
Grading Contracts. Composition Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2006, pp. 35-68.