Grading That Feels Good

Reflections on Job Satisfaction from the Northern Colorado Alternative Grading Group

Photo by Marc Najera on Unsplash

This week’s guest post comes from four authors based in Colorado, who shared a community of practice around alternative grading:

• Molly Gutilla, DrPH, Public Health and Epidemiology, Colorado State University

• Alyson Huff, MA, Philosophy and Honors Program, Colorado State University

• Mark Hussey, MA, English, Front Range Community College

• Jess Rushing, Ph.D., MT-BC, Music Therapy, Colorado State University

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Introduction

“I didn’t set out to change how I grade because I wanted to like my job more. I started because something felt off: my values and my classroom practices weren’t aligned. Grading often felt like a friction point. It felt like paperwork - a task to distract me from why I love teaching.” - Molly Gutilla

Grading can be one of the most exhausting, time-consuming, and emotionally fraught aspects of teaching. When we graded using points, it often felt like a task to get through, or even a drudgery – disconnected from learning, fueling disputes over points, and misaligned with the reasons we became educators. But what if not just grading but our entire jobs could be something different? What if our grading practices didn’t just reflect student learning, but also reshaped our experience of teaching itself?

The impetus for this post grew from conversations in our alternative grading community of practice, a group hosted through the Colorado State University Institute for Learning and Teaching. All four of us approach alternative grading differently, ranging from specifications-based grading to more outcomes-based approaches, based on our specific disciplinary needs. All four of us have fully embraced alternative grading and have no inclination whatsoever to return to points-based grading. This led us to wonder, first, why so many teachers hesitate or even resist alternative grading and, second, if perhaps the larger alternative grading community has not yet succeeded in explaining the benefits – not just for students, not just for learning – but the tangible benefits alternative grading has for teachers.

Across our respective disciplines, we found ourselves asking a simple question: Does alternative grading make us like our jobs more? And if so, how? Our short answer is yes, but the reasons are layered and holistic. Shifting our grading practices changed more than student experiences or grade spreadsheets. It changed how we show up in our classrooms. It reshaped our relationships with students. It softened the stress cycles of end-of-term grading. And maybe most meaningfully, it brought our work back into alignment with our values, restoring a sense of purpose, professional integrity, and job satisfaction.

We offer three general themes of how alternative grading has impacted our work and changed our jobs for the better. These aren’t case studies or best practices. We hope that sharing what it has felt like for us to inhabit our alternatively graded classrooms will invite more teachers into the fold and open important conversations about the impact of alternative grading on job satisfaction.

Point Liberation – Removing the Uninvited Third Wheel

“Abandoning points allows me to do what I enjoy doing as a teacher: teaching what I’m passionate about and genuinely assessing learning in a meaningful way.” Alyson Huff

Teaching is already a high-intensity task, and prior to alternative grading, we couldn’t have known how much additional labor points-based grading had added to our teaching load. When reflecting on the impact of alternative grading on job satisfaction, we all agreed that re-evaluating – and removing – the role of points lifted a huge burden in our daily lives as teachers.

First, grading with points creates unnecessary combativeness between students and teachers. One of us used to make students wait 24 hours before they could respond to their essay grades because, too frequently, students would come to her office crying, complaining, or arguing. Assigning major grades puts us in a place where we have to “ready our defenses”—or we might be blamed for something we did when students disagree with our scores. Now, without points, we no longer spend time worrying about or preparing for the post-grade reveal. In fact, we aren’t revealing grades; we are revealing feedback. And this removes a primary source of combative tension from the classroom – creating important space for growth, learning, and relationship-building. It is more than a relief – it is satisfying – when students anticipate and value our feedback. Today we feel more than ever that our efforts to teach are positively valued, not actively resisted.

Second, points-based grading introduced a tremendous waste of time and cognitive bandwidth. Hours spent determining points, recalibrating rubrics, and fielding student emails about grade percentages, decimals, and fairness–none of that felt like teaching, it felt like paperwork. Additional hours spent writing feedback merely to defend point-values, and not to improve learning. Points had become a needless hurdle, for us as much as for students. Their absence has lightened our overall cognitive load and freed time for more purposeful work. Swapping points for narrative feedback re-centers our efforts and student attention on course level learning outcomes, clear benchmarks, or measurable standards, or we might use the EMRN rubric to give clearer, more developmental feedback without getting caught up in debates over half-points or percentages. Today, instead of internal monologues stressing over point deductions and worrying about retributions, we have gained a greater capacity to be present and engaged with our students.

Not just ditching points, but actually being liberated from their negative impacts, set an important foundation for enjoying our jobs and teaching what we are passionate about.

A Shift to Meaningful Conversations and Relationships

“When I switched to alternative grading, I did so because points-based grading was fundamentally at odds with my efforts to engage students in meaningful conversations.” Mark Hussey

When we graded using points, we found ourselves and our students getting constantly side-tracked by tedious conversations and, subsequently, our relationships felt needlessly confrontational and transactional, focusing on disputes about grades and grade-related technicalities: How many pages does this need to be? Did I do my citations correctly? Do you take off points for spelling? Why did my essay draft only get an “8/10”? The assignments felt like tasks. Grading felt like we were merely doling out rewards and punishments. Students often lacked motivation, and some struggled to care about learning because their energy was focused on the task of getting a grade. Many could care less if they learned anything meaningful – so long as they got their grade. For example, a student once asked, “Can I still do that missing assignment—I really need the points.” The response was, “Yes, you should because it addresses fundamental aspects of the course.” The reply: “Oh, I don’t care about that—I just don’t want to lose the points.” Alternative grading completely short-circuits these types of conversations, and it does so because any inquiries about grades must become inquiries into the kinds of knowledge, competencies, and thought processes on which we now base our grades. In short, our grade conversations have stopped being tedious distractions and have become meaningful inquiries into our disciplines and the process of growth needed to become a professional.

We cannot overstate how this changed the relationship dynamics with our students. We feel less like authority figures and more like coaches – where we primarily provide guidance, advice, feedback, and encouragement. Our assignments are not simply tasks students must check off a to-do list; they feel like, and actually are, opportunities to practice, learn, and develop skills. Without the constant pressure of lost points, our students start to appreciate the value of what they are learning, they see teachers as allies in their own learning process, and in our experiences, they are substantially more motivated not just to do the work but to actually embrace it. When the script is flipped from “what do I need to do to get a better grade” to “what can I do to improve my skill or understanding,” the relationship between students and teachers becomes far more collaborative and mutually supportive.

We have replaced the former drudgery of grading with the much simpler and more satisfying process of reviewing and giving feedback on assignments. Helping students learn is still hard and mentally demanding, but students now actually read and act on feedback, instead of passively accepting it or actively trying to dispute it. Students take greater pride in their accomplishments. Our efforts as educators more squarely focus on the topics, skills, and work that originally got us excited about teaching. Because our work better aligns with our values and passions, we have more room simply to enjoy teaching, and we have a far greater capacity to handle the occasional challenges it brings.

A Refreshing Focus on Teaching and Learning

“Class time is designed to support students’ abilities to demonstrate competencies and meet the specifications for assignments. It is overall harder for them not to come to class now than it is to come to class.” Jess Rushing

One of the most surprising impacts of switching to alternative grading should not, in hindsight, have been surprising. Teaching now feels like it focuses squarely on learning. While teaching under a points-based system, our students would frequently spend the majority of their time doing everything BUT the kinds of researching, reading, thinking, practicing, calculating, and arguing we envision successful students doing. With alternative grading, we have been able to regain the teaching time previously spent on answering distracting questions, such as, “Is this for a grade?” Teaching before alternative grading felt like constantly swimming upstream to navigate deadlines, page counts, assignment technicalities, and any other minutiae that had little to do with learning. Students often spent more time disputing assignment grades than they spent in meaningful engagement with the core of the assignment itself.

Our day-to-day experience today is totally different: We find ourselves mostly talking with students about challenging questions in our disciplines. Whether it’s the knowledge and methods of becoming a skilled music therapist or how to compose a researched argumentative essay, our students are asking questions, not about how to earn points but how to improve. We can then share our unique disciplinary expertise and offer meaningful feedback regarding their learning. The absence of constant grade-induced anxiety, panic, and anger, creates room for us to guide learning and inform growth through revision. We feel refreshed as we look back and realize that our teaching efforts today actually focus on the disciplines that originally brought us into academia.

The focus on learning also extends itself into more traditional elements of the classroom culture. Tests aren’t just for grades; they provide students with opportunities to showcase their learning, identify weaknesses, and gain feedback. Our energy and enthusiasm goes toward supporting students’ abilities to demonstrate competencies and meeting the specifications for assignments and not towards answering demoralizing questions like, “Will this be on the test?” They don’t need to ask because they know they will be supported in their learning and a major source of anxiety has been removed. Students no longer attend class merely for a grade, they attend to learn. The cumulative effect of these changes is that we can keep standards high (or even higher) without adding stress and still honoring individual strengths, learning processes, and areas of needed support. In short, when the grading system truly centers on learning, the entire classroom environment follows suit.

Conclusion

When we began alternative grading, we didn’t realize just how much points-based grading had drained the cognitive and emotional energy of our classrooms. Some of us were even questioning whether to continue teaching. Removing points created renewed energy for our work as teachers and opened doors for students to focus their attention more fully on learning. It’s not the total absence of conflict, but we do value a renewed focus on our actual job and a restoration of our job satisfaction.

To be clear, alternative grading may not make things easier immediately. In fact, it may initially demand more from us: more clarity, more reflection, more communication. But over time, it has changed the focus of our work and made our time in and out of the classroom much more enjoyable. At the end of the day, each of us feels this approach helps us like our jobs more and deepens our motivation to pursue high-quality teaching.