In cobbling together sources for my 2025 MTA Summer Conference presentation on “Getting More from Your Formative Assessments and Grading,” I searched my blog to link posts on books I consider foundational. Somehow, I never published the post I wrote after reading Zerwin’s “Point-less” years back. Her work deserves some attention…

This was the first book I’ve reread since 2022, a time when I really started ramping up my grading research during planning periods after starting a new graduate program. This time, I found myself reviewing what I highlighted the first time, saying, “yep…uh huh…awesome…yep!” all the way through. It was as refreshing experience reminding me where I began before heading down the classroom assessment research path. That is, my work over the last year has mainly been looking into classroom assessment theory since it was necessary to establish when assessments should and should not be graded. I couldn’t really begin to research grading without researching classroom assessment first, but I’m glad to be getting back to a focus on addressing grades because research paints a very clear picture: grades are a problem.

Even though I’ve known that grades can hinder learning from theoretical and empirical perspectives, I’m only now revisiting what to do about the whole dilemma. In other words, this journey has been full circle, starting with noticing a problem as a classroom teacher, heading straight for solutions, stepping back to situate my own research under the broader classroom assessment topic, and finally now coming back to all those proposed solutions with more context. Onto ideas in the book…

Problems with Points & Check Requirements
The first chapter is indispensable for anyone unfamiliar with the long history of documented issues with grading. It’s also a good refresher for those who know, too. Zerwin recommends looking into what is ACTUALLY asked of you as a teacher, citing how her teacher eval expectations basically encourage a gradeless/ungraded system. This is important when administrators or department leaders are less than imaginative. Unless you’ve joined a school or department that does something in a specific way, and you knew about it ahead of time, just point to teacher expectations that would allow you to have students self-reflection and self-grade, etc.

Standards/Goals/Guidelines
While it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that Standards-Based Grading (SBG) is still too much grading (and possibly more than traditional!), a solid understanding of setting and/or selecting learning criteria seems prerequisite for all the gradeless/ungrading work I’ve seen. I appreciate Zerwin’s message about getting overwhelmed by ~65 state standards. Way too many educators misinterpret SBG as State Standards-Based Grading (SSBG), when in reality “standards are not curriculum; they provide the framework upon which curricula are developed. Educators must translate Standards into a teachable curriculum” (p. 23, quoting Jay McTighe, 2012).

After figuring out what is truly required (i.e., what you’ll be evaluated on, or what others in your department have agreed upon), establish goals. For Zerwin, this is a set of 10 goals connected to the Common Core State Standards, such as “1. The student is a reader with a vibrant, self-directed reading practical that will continue beyond the classroom” (p.27). Students choose THREE of these goals to focus on. What’s really crucial here, is that all goal content is taught, it’s just that students self-reflect on a few of them to ensure deeper work rather than self-reflecting and grading being an “onerous task” (p. 126).

Some authors and presenters leave the matter of determining final grades up to the reader, which can be a good idea when teachers are so pressed for time that they often want immediate, pre-packaged solutions. A lot of these solutions don’t fit well for the context, however, so teachers can walk away thinking the practices are no good. That’s why Zerwin’s book clearly outlines what you have to think about, in the way you have to think about it. Still, to make sure everything isn’t left in the abstract, Zerwin includes her criteria for what qualifies as an A. You might find some criteria jumping out at you like “100% completion” and “No Late Work,” but I learned from Zerwin her self that this has since been updated to 90% completion. The point here is that whatever your expectations are as a teacher, make them clear to students so there are no surprises come time to self-reflect.

Explore Your Gradebook
Among the list of 14 steps to go point-less on page 169, there are other awesome hacks, like putting words into the score boxes such as “complete” or “partial” instead of numbers (and assigning numerical values to those words if needed), as well as using the comment/description box to report scores (vs. having them calculate as a percentage).

Self-Reflection Format
Among my top picks for gradeless/ungrading advocates, I find that Zerwin’s flair lies in how she handles self-reflections, and it’s right at home in an ELA class. In short, students write narratives that align 1:1 with the writing goals of Zerwin’s classes. Would I have done the same in my first year Latin classes? Nope: for my second language students, we wanted most of the time to be spent in the target language, and beginners can’t really write much yet, so a simple rationale (in English) that supported the grade they selected is all I was looking for. I do, however, recommend considering what this might look like in any class focused on writing.

Gradebook
The self-reflections were 99% of students’ grade in Zerwin’s classes. With such a strong emphasis on eliminating points, I was surprised to see that 1% was accounted for by three other completion-based categories labeled Major Assignments (0.75%), Weekly Drafts (0.20%), and Minor Assignments (0.05%). Zerwin did this so these categories would populate some kind of grade throughout the semester between self-reflection times. What I couldn’t understand, though, is why students didn’t just do a self-reflection at the six or twelve week progress report(s) in the main category (now changed to 100%), and Zerwin could just update that grade with each next self-reflection.

So, I reached out to Sarah and asked about that. It turns out that she’s written a new book since “Point-Less…,” entitled Step Aside, with some updates that includes learning progressions, of which I’m a big fan (see my post on Jung’s learning progressions). Specific to what I was asking about, Sarah said that like all teachers, her practices are tailored to her context, which in her case is a school looking for weekly grade updates for its athlete-centric community. Not only that, but the school no longer does the progress report check points, meaning the weekly 1% grades make sense for her situation. She went on to explain how this system still has an emphasis on process over product. Her guidelines have also shifted to be 90% or higher work completion (vs. the previous 100%). Other changes include streamlining the gradebook by entering a weekly account of completed work (vs. every single assignment), and having students submit a weekly Google Form with a checklist of what they completed.

I appreciate Sarah taking the time to do respond and share ideas, especially about the concept of having a traditional to gradeless/ungrading/point-less continuum, and how any given teacher, and/or author could be placed along that continuum. We agree that SBG is not as far away from traditional grading as many people think, and we also agree that any teacher who submits a final grade, which is almost everyone, can’t really be at the far end of that continuum. Nonetheless, the more practices a teacher has or for which an author advocates that fall closer to the gradeless/ungraded/point-less end, the better off teaching and learning will be for all.

So, I hope you enjoy Point-less, and looks like the newer book will make its way on my To Read list! Stay tuned.