Disciplinary Dialogues on Ungrading in the Second Language Writing Classroom: Implications for L2 Writing Pedagogy

Madeline Crozier Sutton, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA

What is ungrading? Ask eight L2 writing scholars, and you’ll hear eight nuanced responses. Generally, ungrading refers to alternative assessment methods such as labor-based grading, contract grading, and specifications (specs) grading.^[1] These approaches supplant traditional grading practices that seek to rank students’ work in favor of approaches that value students’ efforts and labors. Alternative assessment strives to resist conventional grading approaches that, by privileging standard language ideology over linguistic creativity or expression, risk harm to all students, particularly English language learners, multilingual writers, and students of color.

The field of second language writing (SLW) widely agrees about the importance of effective writing assessment to support student learning. The “Disciplinary Dialogues” section of the December 2024 issue (volume 66) of the Journal of Second Language (JSLW) exemplifies current conversations around alternative assessment voiced among SLW teachers, scholars, and researchers.

Summary of the Publication

JSLW’s Disciplinary Dialogues on ungrading includes seven contributions from eight leading scholars who explore current attitudes and debates around the use of alternative assessment practices in the teaching of SLW. The entire section runs 18 pages; the approachable length makes the Disciplinary Dialogues readily accessible. Readers feel invited to listen to a scholarly conversation about ungrading, one grounded in the experiences of instructors and multilingual students.

The section begins with an introduction from the section editors, Soo Hyon Kim and Tanita Saenkhum, which clearly outlines the issue’s exigence to highlight ungrading in the teaching of SLW. The section features a focus paper by Deborah Crusan followed by five responses that provide various theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical perspectives on ungrading.^[2] Altogether, the section unites prominent voices in SLW studies to examine an approach that appears with increasing frequency in the multilingual writing classroom.

Focus Paper—An Introduction to Ungrading

Deborah Crusan’s focus paper, “Ungrading: Revolution or Evolution,” productively introduces ungrading by summarizing definitions and ethical considerations in alternative assessment. Crusan grounds the conversation in a historical context, recognizing that non-traditional assessment practices trace back more than 25 years within published SLW scholarship. She defines ungrading as an approach that “shifts the focus from grades to learning outcomes, emphasizing the development of critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving” (p. 3). It can support student agency, engagement, motivation, and learning. Alongside these benefits, a potential barrier to ungrading relates to instructor positionality; given that “some identities might make it harder to ungrade” (p. 3), some teachers might experience higher stakes in using alternative assessment methods. Nonetheless, the principles of ungrading “align with many existing best practices in L2 writing education” (p. 4).

Like most of her fellow contributors, Crusan uses ungrading, and she encourages her students to reflect critically on the role of assessment in their academic lives. She asks students two questions each semester: “(1) What is your best experience with the assessment of writing as a student? as a teacher? (2) What is your worst/most difficult experience with the assessment of writing as a student? as a teacher?” (p. 4). Blending theoretical perspectives with practical, classroom-tested experiences, the article firmly establishes ungrading as a valuable classroom practice.

Response Pieces—Various Perspectives

Among the five response pieces, two work to extend definitions of ungrading, one with broad strokes and one with specific feedback practices. In “Ungrading as an Assessment Philosophy: Reliability, Validity, and Practicality,” Sara Cushing suggests the value of “fram[ing] ungrading as a philosophy of assessment, rather than a set of specific practices” (p. 1). Cushing advocates for instructors to consider principles of reliability, validity, and practicality. Reliability describes “consistency in grading,” while validity depicts alignment between an assessment tool and what it purports to assess, and practicality accounts for the time and effort involved in any assessment practice. These guiding terms can help instructors choose and implement pedagogically sound alternative assessment practices. Relatedly, instructors seeking approachable conceptions of ungrading might find utility in Atta Gebril’s “Toward a Reconciliatory Approach to Ungrading in Writing Classes: A Response to Crusan.” Instead of ungrading, Gebril proposes the term learning-oriented feedback, which originated in scholarship on formative assessment. Learning-oriented feedback prioritizes timely, constructive feedback that involves students in assessment practices specifically designed to support engaged learning. The label could be useful for instructors navigating difficult institutional contexts. By promoting distinct ways of thinking about ungrading, these contributions provide additional pathways to adopt alternative assessment practices.

For readers seeking pragmatic practices to begin ungrading in their classrooms, two response pieces reflect clear applications, with one rooted in pedagogical expertise and the other in qualitative research. Icy Lee, in “Feedback Over Grades: Enhancing Learning Through Ungrading,” joins Gebril with a focus on feedback. Lee has long argued that teachers should “de-emphasize grades if they want students to reap maximum benefits from feedback”; in ungrading, feedback promotes “student-centered assessment, learner agency, and learner engagement” (p. 1). She advocates for “detailed, descriptive, dialogic feedback,” “ongoing, timely feedback,” “feedback from different sources,” and students’ “active involvement in the feedback process” (p. 2). Active involvement can include co-constructed rubrics, personal learning goals, and peer review. Strong empirical evidence about the benefits of ungrading is located in Mikenna Leigh Modesto’s “‘It Can Be a Very Equalizing Way to Grade’: Contract Grading and Multilingual Writers.” This contribution features qualitative research that brings the voices of international students and domestic multilingual writers into the dialogue. Modesto found that although some students experienced “confusion about their course grading contract at the beginning of an academic term,” those confusions were substantially resolved over time (p. 2)—a useful primer to have explicit conversation about ungrading in the multilingual writing classroom.

Writing program administrators (WPAs) can find an organizational perspective in “Questions of Time and Communication: A Writing Program Administrator’s Experiences with Labor-Based Grading” by Todd Ruecker. He shares anecdotally from a program assessment survey that developmental writers felt overwhelming satisfaction with labor-based grading (93% of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed to the question). Though Ruecker has used contract grading once in his own teaching, he feels strongly as a WPA that professional development around ungrading should extend primarily to “experienced instructors.” Due to considerations around instructor labor, assessment workload, and time constraints, he “generally discourage[s] first year graduate instructors from using contract grading.” Ruecker approaches ungrading with a skepticism rooted in his motivation to protect instructors’ and students’ experiences, despite programmatic data that affirms the value of contract grading. Regardless, as an instructor who used ungrading in her first year of teaching with powerful results, I caution against generalizations that limit alternative assessment possibilities for novice instructors and graduate student instructors (GSIs). In my experiences as an instructor and GSI mentor, ungrading can actually help new instructors save time, because marking work as complete/incomplete enables a focus on providing constructive, meaningful feedback, which facilitates alignment between instructors’ pedagogical beliefs and assessment practices.

Interlude: My Story as an Instructor

I began using ungrading in first-year composition courses as a GSI and I never looked back. I decided to use labor-based assessment practices to align with my philosophy of antiracist pedagogy. I taught in an English Department with a highly supportive environment for alternative assessment, a movement led by Megan Von Bergen (see, for example, Von Bergen, 2024). I have since ungraded in mainstream, multilingual, and cross-cultural first-year composition (FYC) courses that enrolled both native and non-native English-speaking students.

As a teacher-scholar who both uses and studies writing assessment, I found much of the Disciplinary Dialogues affirming my own experiences, particularly in the succinct empirical evidence that supports its benefits (Modesto; Ruecker). I saw alignment between the conceptual frameworks and my own classroom practices for multilingual writers. My equitable assessment approach includes five key practices: complete/incomplete grading, a grading matrix that correlates effort with end-of-term grades, collaborative rubrics, reflective self-assessment, and extensive peer review practice. I specifically use these practices in alignment with my philosophy of equitable assessment to focus students’ attention on their learning, processes, and labors rather than subjective measures of their learning, products, and grades. Clear and routine conversations about ungrading support student engagement and understanding; these strategies mitigated potential student confusion. As Crusan emphasized, fairness is a guiding principle for writing assessment; ungrading helped me accomplish it.

Implications for Writing Instruction

The JSLW Disciplinary Dialogues on ungrading advocates for SLW writing instructors and administrators to reflect critically on assessment practices, values, and beliefs. In doing so, instructors can identify alignment between their pedagogical goals and the aims of alternative assessment practices like ungrading. While the Disciplinary Dialogues summarizes many of the multifaceted and various perspectives on ungrading, it does so primarily from a scholarly perspective. Readers seeking more practical examples or how-tos should browse Crusan’s references list, which covers key texts that introduce alternative assessment practices in more detail.

A key takeaway for me, as a writing instructor, is that many of the perceived challenges of ungrading actually support its use. The arguments against ungrading—its confounding definitions (Kim & Saenkhum), instructor workload (Crusan; Ruecker), concerns over reliability and validity (Cushing), and a risk of confusion for students (Modesto; Ruecker)—apply to traditional assessment, too. Such cautions rarely (if ever) advocate for conventional assessment practices; rather, they recommend care in choosing assessment methods that align with pedagogical approaches, institutional context and constraints, and student needs. Anticipated challenges to ungrading can be addressed with clear communication; timely, dialogic feedback from a range of sources; and involving students in the assessment process. Ungrading does not simply mean no grades; instead, it refers to a range of systematic, equitable approaches to assessment that prioritize fairness, effort, and growth (see Von Bergen, 2023). All in all, alternative assessment better positions instructors to support multilingual students’ writing development, learning, and agency. The Disciplinary Dialogues left me firm in my convictions to ungrade—and support all instructors to do so—in the multilingual writing classroom.

References

Crusan, D. (2024). Ungrading: Revolution or evolution. Journal of Second Language Writing, 66, 101149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2024.101149

Cushing, S. T. (2024). Ungrading as an assessment philosophy: Reliability, validity, and practicality. Journal of Second Language Writing, 66, 101152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2024.101152

Gebril, A. (2024). Towards a reconciliatory approach to ungrading in writing classes: A response to Crusan. Journal of Second Language Writing, 66, 101151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2024.101151

Lee, I. (2024). Feedback over grades: Enhancing learning through ungrading. Journal of Second Language Writing, 66, 101148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2024.101148

Modesto, M. L. (2024). ‘It can be a very equalizing way to grade’: Contract grading and multilingual writers. Journal of Second Language Writing, 66,101147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2024.101147

Ruecker, T. (2024). Questions of time and communication: A writing program administrator's experiences with labor-based grading. Journal of Second Language Writing, 66, 101153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2024.101153

Soo H. K., & Saenkhum, T. (2024). To grade is not to grade?: Exploring ungrading in the teaching of L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 66, 101155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2024.101155

Von Bergen, M. (2023). Defining ungrading: Alternative writing assessment as jeremiad. Composition Studies, 51(2), 137−142.

Von Bergen, M. K. (2024). Hostile and hospitable programmatic architectures: WPA work and ungrading. Pedagogy, 24(3), 457−475.

[1] For additional resources on ungrading, see Jesse Stommel’s (2023) Undoing the grade: Why we grade, and how to stop;on labor-based and contract grading, see Asao Inoue’s (2022) Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom; on specs grading, see Linda Nelson and Joseph Packowski’s (2025) Specifications Grading 2.0: Restoring rigor, motivating students, saving faculty time, and developing career competencies(the first edition also offers a useful [and more concise] primer).

[2] Because the papers all come from the same 2024 issue of JSLW, I avoid repeating the publication year for ease of readings. See the References list for full bibliographic information for each source.

Madeline Crozier Sutton is an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Writing Studies and Assistant Director of the Thompson Writing Program Writing Studio at Duke University, where she studies composition theory and pedagogy, writing pedagogy education, and writing assessment. Her research has appeared in Composition Forum, Journal of Business & Technical Communication, and several edited collections.