“Academics should not be terrified of one another’s judgments, just as students should not be afraid of their teachers. … we need to imagine things as they might be otherwise; in this case, a world where evaluation of others isn’t part of the daily work of teachers, academics, or students. A world instead where worth is assumed — where great worth is assumed — and where everyone is allowed to take a bow.”
— Sean Michael Morris, The End of Grades: An Afterword to Undoing the Grade, 2023
I have been casually observing the conversation about ungrading for the past couple of years. My work only touches on teaching as it affects your ability to manage your workload, avoid overwork, and protect time for writing, so I haven’t really delved into it.
The principles have been fermenting in the back of my mind though, and I’m ready to say something about how they might connect to issues that are not directly about what you do in your classroom.
The publication of Jesse Stommel’s latest book Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop has been the catalyst for finally writing something. And Sean Michael Morris has provided the perfect connection in the conclusion of his Afterword.
Peer review is editing.
The work of peer review is editorial work.
Despite increasing commercialization of scholarly publishing over the past 100 years or so (see Fyfe et al Untangling Academic Publishing, 2017) this editorial work has remained largely voluntary. This type of editorial work has been professionalized in other types of publishing.
As with so many skills you use in your daily work as an academic, you are expected to pick this up without explicit training. This work may not even have been named as editing.
You have not been trained as an editor. Your peers have not been trained as editors.
You have, however, been trained to grade. Perhaps haphazardly by observation and mimicry. Perhaps formally as part of the training provided to Teaching Assistants and new academics. Perhaps informally through mentoring by colleagues or as part of systems for ensuring the quality and consistency of grades.
Grading includes feedback. That feedback is not only a justification for the grade, though that is an important element, but is also considered as part of the work of teaching and learning.
You may be familiar with the terms “formative assessment” or “scaffolded assessment”, which assume previous graded assignments teach the skills needed for later ones.
You may recognize the feedback you provide to your students as editing. You may engage in learning activities to improve your ability to give effective feedback in this context.
However, as Stommel points out, research shows that grades distract students from these learning goals
“In an educational system that increasingly centers grades and quantifiable outcomes, students work for the grade rather than for learning.”
— Jesse Stommel, “An Introduction to Ungrading”, Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop, 2023
Grading confuses editing with evaluation
“I had this professor in graduate school who was notorious for being a brutal grader.”
— Melissa Dalgliesh, “Learning to Love Being Edited”, Hook & Eye, April 2017)
The ranking function of grades actively mitigates against engaging meaningfully with feedback. As Dalgliesh’s piece points out, it rewards students for submitting work that doesn’t need (much) editing. And may even discourage students from submitting work that requires editing.
You may find this easier to recognize in your own conflicted feelings about the work of grading your students.
“Grading is a very unpleasant activity; even for those of us who enjoy coming to class and engaging our students in lively discussions about the subject of the day, grading is one thing we have to put up with. … grading flips my life around, and I’m generally in a stinky mood for several days. …
— Liana Silva, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Words Are My Game, May 2011; no longer available online, cited in “The Emotional Toll of Grading”
You can give a grade in a few seconds. You can probably write comments justifying the grade in a few minutes.
You are reluctant to limit the time you devote to grading because you can’t give good editorial feedback in a few minutes. Good editorial feedback looks like helping to improve writing.
If you cut back on this feedback, you’d feel terrible.
You are equally frustrated when students don’t read your feedback and only seem to care about the grades. As Stommel argues:
“Ultimately, traditional grades are better at measuring and reinforcing compliance than they are at measuring or adequately communicating learning, engagement, or content knowledge.”
— Jesse Stommel, “An Introduction to Ungrading”, Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop, 2023
Grading, exclusion, and the community of thinkers
“Grades are means to only one end: they are designed to keep people out. We mask them as progress reports, as neutral evaluation tools; but the point of grades is to tell someone whether they belong or not, whether they have earned belonging.”
— Sean Michael Morris, The End of Grades: An Afterword to Undoing the Grade, 2023)
Highly unequal systems require technologies for creating that inequality, preferably ones that make it appear natural and inevitable. Grading is such a technology and works with other evaluation and sorting technologies to produce the hierarchies that appear inevitable.
Jesse Stommel notes that grading is a relatively recent addition to the technologies of education.
”Historically, grades are more of an anomaly than anything else. They are a very recent technology. In North America, letter grades have an approximately 240-year history and weren’t used with any regularity until the last 75 years (Schinske and Tanner). There is nothing normal, and certainly nothing inevitable, about grades.”
— Jesse Stommel, “An Introduction to Ungrading”, Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop, 2023
The extension of grading logics to performance measurement in workplaces, and the particular forms that this takes in academic workplaces, is even more recent.
The use of publication metrics to evaluate your performance means that publishing has become a type of grading. Knowing you will eventually be “graded” on the number and place of publication affects your approach to writing, submitting, and peer review. (See Communication vs Validation: Why are you publishing?)
That said, competing value systems can coexist even in the most inhospitable of cultures. There are strong traditions of universities and scholarly associations as communities of scholars and scholarly work as a collective endeavour.
Peer review comes out of this tradition. It is a formalized system for seeking and providing feedback on new intellectual developments, under the control of the community of scholars who value the advancement of knowledge in the particular field above all else.
Or that’s what it aspires to be…
Editing is not cheating.
“My editors make my work so much better. It is such a surprising pleasure to write something that I’m already happy with, then have it come back to me tighter, more elegant, more on the nose, better structured”
— Melissa Dalgliesh, “Learning to Love Being Edited”, Hook & Eye, April 2017
Dalgliesh is writing about the differences she observes once she has left academia. As I noted above, the work of peer review is equivalent to work done by professional editors in other employment and publishing contexts. The main difference is that it is voluntary labour, for which most have not been trained.
Having support to clarify your structure and providing external objective opinions is normal. All writers need editors of various kinds.
These might be colleagues, professionals that you hire and pay yourself, professionals who are employees or contractors of your publisher, or someone else.
Seeking or accepting this support does not mean that the final work is not your own. Feedback should always centre the author whose worth is assumed, and provide perspectives to improve the work. This is why I like the work of Liz Lerman so much.
The obfuscation of editorial labour in academic contexts means that many academics are often not clear about the various types of editing and may combine different types in different ways.
This lack of clarity about different types of editing affects academic editorial labour. You might receive (or provide) detailed copy-edits at a stage when developmental edits might be more appropriate. Or introduce new developmental edits, when a piece is at the stage where it could be copy edited and published. Perfectionism and other factors feed in here, too.
Other worlds are possible
It is unsurprising that the practice of peer review has been distorted by the logics of grading.
Some peer reviewers undoubtedly see their role as akin to grading, with the goal of excluding “substandard” work from the particular journal. Those peer reviewers who make comments about your abilities as a scholar in their review of a specific manuscript are definitely in this camp.
As Morris points out, grading easily shifts from an evaluation of a specific piece of work to the evaluation of the worth of its author.
I maintain that this is a distortion, albeit one produced by very powerful social forces.
Peer review is worth saving. It is worth fighting for as a technology for the collective production of knowledge.
- We can learn to be better editors.
- We can commit to treating the work as editorial and to valuing editorial work, even if we are still learning as we go.
- We can engage in peer review on the basis that the scholar who has submitted the work is already worthy.
- We can question the ways in which other forms of grading and exclusion frame who we consider scholars worthy of submitting work.
And we can work to extend these values to our students, our community partners, and others.
It’ll be imperfect.
You’ve been in this system for over 20 years, as a student and, more recently, as a teacher and researcher.
You did well in a system based on grades. It’s probably a bit weird to think you were harmed by that.
Your emotional reaction when you receive your peer review reports is valid. And it’s grounded in all those years of experience. Your fear of exclusion is real.
The reviews may not meet the standard of high quality editorial input we aspire to. They may not be based on a view of writing and publication as a collective endeavour in which editorial labour is valid. You’ll need strategies for dealing with that, emotionally and practically.
That other world may be possible, but it’s not here yet. You are bringing it into being as part of a community of thinkers who share your values.
I have written a Short Guide that will help you, as both a reviewer and an author receiving reviews. I’ve also created a course that focuses on helping you manage your emotional reactions and approach your reviewer comments as someone already worthy of inclusion who will benefit from editorial feedback.
You can do this!
Related Posts & Links:
An Introduction to Ungrading | Hybrid Pedagogy by Jesse Stommel
Ungrading: an Introduction | Jesse Stommel
Do we need the word “Ungrading”? | Jesse Stommel
Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop | Press Books
Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop by Jesse Stommel (US Amazon buy link)
The End of Grades: An Afterword to Undoing the Grade by Sean Michael Morris
For thinking about what this might mean in practice, I recommend:
“From Coteries to Collectives” by The Bigger Six Collective, Symbiosis, Spring 2019
“HE4Good editorial principles: heterogeneity, care, and community” by Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz
This post was originally sent to the Newsletter on 15 Dec 2023. It has been lightly edited and extensive links added.
