Originally published in The Teaching Professor, a trusted resource for evidence-based ideas, strategies that work, and pragmatic approaches to enhance learning in the college classroom.
Emergent Change applied equity and inclusion to grading and feedback using a social-emotional lens, inherent to DEI work both in and outside classrooms.
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As educators who focus on facilitating meaningful learning and genuine reflection, we are painfully familiar with the questions students regularly ask that demonstrate anything but:
“How many points is this assignment worth?”
“Do you offer any extra credit?”
“Can you round up my grade?”
“What do I need to do to get an A?”
These questions can deeply frustrate educators in pursuit of developing learners’ senses of intrinsic motivation—though personally, the moment that made me dramatically reorient my grading practices was not a question from a student, but from a student’s poignant reflection.
Three years ago, I facilitated a class dialogue to explore students’ thoughts on potential revisions to our grading system. In a moment of impressive vulnerability, a student named Hannah shared her takeaways from our literary journalism task: “You gave me the most loving and uplifting feedback I’ve ever received on my writing—but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I got a 47 out of 50, and not a perfect score.”
Hannah named a cognitive dissonance that so many students feel, and with which many educators can empathize (Butler, 1988). The primary aim of feedback is to guide learners towards growth—but educators and students alike know the feeling of when that guidance is obscured by points (or the lack thereof). We do not want to perpetuate deleterious perfectionist tendencies, leading learners to believe that this illusory idea of “perfect” can even be quantified. Instead, we want learners to focus on how they can become active thinkers and doers ultimately for their own sake, not for the sake of “more points.”
It was this moment of pedagogical reckoning that led me not only to explore but to deeply integrate comments-only feedback into my practice.
What is comments-only feedback?
Coined by educator Sarah M. Zerwin (2020), “pointless” or comments-only feedback is an approach that eliminates numerical scoring from the assessment process, focusing solely on reflections, qualitative comments, and progress markers (e.g. “exceeded expectations,” “partial understanding”). The approach encapsulates feedback that is “only” qualitative; after all, when students receive points and comments on a task (such as with rubrics), they focus on the points. Once removed, they no longer distract learners, diminishing the cognitive dissonance students like Hannah experienced between numerical perfection and intrinsically motivated growth.
Zerwin also reminds us that comments-only feedback is the norm for settings outside of being a student: qualitative insight from peers and mentors guides our growth as professionals; percentages, scores, and letter grades are rarely part of daily life after graduation.
Examples of qualitative scales I designed to succinctly inform a learner of their proximity to achieving course objectives, on a task overall or with discrete skills specifically
Maintaining a baseline “shared language” for tracing growth, this method trades points for scales. Instead of scoring a task as, say, 38 points out of 50, we could offer an “applying” marker, providing the learner with a clearer sense of achievement and of subsequent next steps. By taking out the quantitative, we necessarily focus on the more meaningful qualitative.
Core advantages of comments-only feedback
In an educational landscape dominated by quantitative grading, classrooms will understandably find a shift towards comments-only feedback a bit awkward. Despite the initial challenges, if the primary aim of grading is to clearly mark progress, and feedback is to guide learners toward recognizing their areas for growth, investment in exploring comments-only approaches offers an array of benefits.
1. Streamlines educators’ communication and use of time
Instead of needing to justify points and letters (e.g. “Why did I get a 7 out of 10?” “What does a ‘B’ even mean?”), comments-only feedback directs the conversation with newfound clarity towards actionable next steps for how students can grow. From the moment students receive targeted and applicable qualitative feedback, without the distraction or quantitative translation of points, they have an immediate and unfiltered sense of how to improve. When given such self-reflective scaffolding in the form of clear and consistent feedback, learners no longer need their educators to hold their hands as tightly with extra office hours or detailed email exchanges defending grade determinations (Brookhart, 2017).
2. Recognizes learners as fellow producers of knowledge
In a comments-only approach to feedback, the educator is positioned much more as a mentor and thought partner and less so as a final arbiter of rubber-stamped scores. When creating quantitative scales to measure progress, it is crucial to include an “innovating” marker on your scale—or whatever term resonates most with you and your learners—which captures the fact that the educator’s expectations can be exceeded. This language and subsequent mindset decenters ideas of “perfection” or arbitrary “finish lines,” instead allowing us to codify within our grading systems an academic culture of collaboration, creativity, risk-taking, and imagination (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). (Students regularly and pleasantly surprised me in their attempts to “innovate”!)
3. Generates meaningful and individualized rigor
Comments-only feedback more precisely outlines what the most rigorous next steps are for any individual student, which is inevitably unique from what is most rigorous for other students in the class—a level of granularity that, say, two matching scores on a midterm would not necessarily capture (Tomlinson, 2014). By removing the pursuit of points or of a specific score from students’ internal dialogues on how to improve, educators instead guide their students with feedback tailored to their respective needs and challenges. Even if that feedback comes from a collection of prewritten comments that address common areas of growth, as long as that feedback is precise and hand-picked, educators strategically differentiate how they encourage students to challenge themselves.
4. Allows for gradual integration into grading systems
I know personally that despite the unique benefits of doing so, shifting your entire grading system exclusively to comments-only grading is considerably daunting and might exceed your bandwidth. Thankfully, even small applications of comments-only feedback can recenter learners’ senses of clarity and intrinsic motivation. Class participation, quizzes, timed writings, lab reports, virtual forum posts—consider applying comments-only feedback structures to one or multiple of these course components. Even if other parts of the course remain points-based for now, students will carry what they uniquely gained from their comments-only feedback into those other assessments.
How is a final grade determined?
An example of letter grade descriptors I co-created with students; a course-long outline of holistic objectives that students used to guide their end-of-semester self-reflections
Whether your course uses a hybrid of point-based and comments-only feedback, or has fully committed to comments-only feedback, the final grade reflects a synthesis of student self-assessments, educator observations, and evidence of growth through performance tasks, all oriented around specific learning goals or competencies. Ideally, as with any grading system, how final grades are specifically determined highly depends on the evolving needs and idiosyncrasies of educators and their students. My class opted for a portfolio system: students compiled their performance tasks, feedback, and subsequent reflections into portfolios; at the end of the semester, students and I conferenced to determine which letter grade descriptor best aligned with their portfolios overall.
But there is no one “right answer” for how to synthesize qualitative observations into a summative grade. From basing grades on students’ end-of-course letter grade reflections, to conferencing with students to reach consensus on a letter grade, to simply assigning a letter grade according to the educators’ holistic comments-only feedback—there are many reasonable approaches that maintain clarity while still acknowledging nuance.
Lingering questions about comments-only feedback
It would be ironic to claim that comments-only feedback, an approach that attempts to dismantle perfectionism and ignite lifelong learning, is a “perfect” grading system. Merely considering a grading system outside conventional wisdom is, in and of itself, a perplexing yet worthwhile line of pedagogical inquiry:
How does integrating comments-only systems as individual educators differ from team- or institution-based approaches?
How malleable are educational technology and learning management systems to divergence from point-based grading systems?
How much of the fundamental intention behind comments-only feedback is eventually foiled by final letter grades?
When we come to terms with the fact that neither points-based or comments-only feedback systems are purely “objective,” what place does “subjectivity” have in the inherently subjective journeys of growth and learning?
A Case for Comments-Only Is a Case for Discomfort
Especially when the exploration of comments-only feedback raises these complex and uncomfortable questions to which we are still, and always will be, developing answers, assigning numbers to tasks and students likely feels comfortable and concrete. This system for assessment and reflection has been, for so many of us, all that we have experienced or perpetuated. To stray from this norm is inherently unsettling.
This discomfort is inherent to the experimentations, forward failings, and eventual progress necessary for redesigning paradigms that newly empower our students. The transition to comments-only feedback is not just a pedagogical shift: it is a cultural one. Whether in their unique courses or across a whole institution, educators can foster cultures where learning is celebrated as a nuanced, multifaceted process, where failures become opportunities—and where students like Hannah, who triggered this pedagogical shift in me in the first place, no longer have the fullness of their achievements obscured by points.
References
Brookhart, S. M. (2017). How to give effective feedback to your students. ASCD.
Butler, R. (1987). Task-involving and ego-involving properties of evaluation: Effects of different feedback conditions on motivational perceptions, interest, and performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(4), 474–482. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-0663.79.4.474
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487
Tomlinson, C. A. (2014). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners (2nd ed.). Pearson Education.
Zerwin, S. M. (2020). Point-less: An English teacher’s guide to more meaningful grading. Heinemann.
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