I left my 2025 MTA Summer Conference workshop participants with a LOT of resources to read. After getting through all the recommended posts and maybe even books, however, they’ll probably still face the question of “what do I DO?!” The answer to that shouldn’t be a one-size-fits all panacea, but I can definitely offer some guidance since there are relatively few moves to make in the pursuit of grading less…

Given the dilemma of teachers grading way too many assessments, too often, and students reporting a lack of feedback, there are two main goals to accomplish:

1. Grading less
2. Increasing feedback

It just so happens that grading less opens up room for providing more feedback. As long as you work on giving specific, actionable feedback while involving learners in the process of (a) understanding expectations, (b) recognizing gaps, and (c) doing something to improve learning (re: SE2R), the priority falls on grading less.

How to Grade Less
The simplest changes to start with would be chopping off the top row or first/last column of rubrics, and stop writing numbers, letters, and ratings on student work. This ensures that individual assessments remain gradeless and formative during the learning process, as they should be.

Very quickly, however, you’ll find yourself needing a new system to report achievement.

This is no small feat when your students’ course grades have been the result of the computer averaging individual assessment grades across various categories and weights. That is, you’ll need a way to get fewer grades for each of these categories, and you’ll need to do it in a way that’s a valid measurement.

This presents the first problem since grading comes down to a sampling issue. That is, when you take an average of graded assessments to represent learning, you need at least three samples per category, and probably five or more to have a more accurate sample of graded student work. So, if you’ve got five grading categories you’re looking at a minimum of 15 grades and more like 25+. Doing this about eight times (e.g., quarter system + progress reports) means about 200 grades. This is way too many. Therefore, chopping off those rubric grades isn’t enough.

This is the point where efforts often stall because there aren’t very many options on how to have fewer grades in the gradebook while also making them a valid representation of learning. We’re basically talking about moving towards portfolios and having students self-assess and self-grade. Once you end up finding a way to do that, rest assured that you’ll find more wiggle room in related practices and approaches to the portfolio + self-assess + self-grade.

Portfolio + Self-assess + Self-grade
It just so happens that the school year is divided into convenient times when it would make sense to report achievement. That is, while we know that reporting achievement daily is both unnecessary and has negative effects on learning, reporting achievement eight times a year (e.g., quarters + progress reports) is plenty.

Ideally, we’re talking about just one grade for each progress report and each quarter, so you can get rid of your grading categories. This should feel liberating after its initial shock. By all means, keep categories of learning evidence related to specific skills, etc., but now is time to get away from the assessment-format-as-grading-category (e.g., Quizzes, Tests, Projects), and freely collect learning evidence in whatever form makes sense. Meaning, a quiz, test, and project could all be evidence of some content or skill to be learned. No need to require 3-5+ of each format to justify the averaged grade in its category. Liberation.

So, you want a single grade, but let’s note that it would be a bad idea for you to determine that grade. This would remove student agency, and also feel like you’re keeping secrets. Thus, you’re gonna need students to compare their work against criteria and grade themselves, and you’re gonna need some kind of portfolio if you expect to back these student grades with evidence that they and anyone can see. That is, if there’s no learning evidence to point to, it will look like kids are just making up their grades on the spot. Therefore, a physical or digital portfolio of all those assessments with no grades (because you’ve stopped grading individual assignments) serve as the learning evidence students can look at when determining their grade, and what you look at when you review these grades.

Where’s the Wiggle Room?!
The readings (and workshop slides in the conference app) offer different ways to go about all this, such as developing learning progressions as more comprehensive forms of rubrics that help every student progress at their own rate (re: post on Jung), and holding student-led conferences to bolster the self-assessment and self-grading process (re: posts on Blum & Sackstein). In my experience, this wasn’t necessary, and students self-assessed, self-graded, and provided a rationale all within 5-10 minutes of one class, eight times throughout the year. I did have to teach them how to write these, but what I got was all I needed. ELA or history teachers might want to take an approach that incorporates this self-assessment and rationale into coursework, becoming its own source of writing learning evidence (re: post on Zerwin). Or, start simple, then build towards something like that.

The readings (and slides) also get into little side issues that can make a big splash within the community, like using a grading scale with fewer levels. I do NOT recommend 0-5 scales, and instead advocate the already-familiar alphanumeric, just fewer of them (i.e., 100(A+), 95(A), 85(B), 75(C), 65(D), 55(F)). There’s also some nuts-and-bolts of tweaking one’s gradebook to reflect this new system of reporting, while giving everyone what they expect and want. Check out the posts on Barnes and Zerwin with details on how they used the gradebook’s assignment description for providing feedback, and even reporting scores here (when necessary) so they didn’t factor into the grade, but were somewhere that could be checked. Zerwin also has some practices that reduce grading in a school that requires a significant number of grades.

Obstacles
We ended the workshop by getting into some obstacles that teachers face when attempting to grade less. The most common one I keep hearing about is a requirement of one or two grades per student in the gradebook per week. This kind of policy conflicts with classroom assessment theory and best practices, and gets in the way of “grading less,” though in my experience all the “grades” that are required under these policies are loosely defined, if at all.

For example, the symbols in PowerTeacher that convey “missing,” “late,” or “collected” usually provide all the information people need and expect. These updates, each week, provide parents with information on what’s going on far more than an alphanumeric grade. As long as the understanding is that students have the entire grading term to get on track, those missing assignments are just temporary, and they should expect the course grade to remain the same, or improve. If students don’t do that, and/or their achievement drops, the self-assessed self-grade will be lower. This basically is the same outcome. What’s different is the signposts along the way, which should certainly be accompanied by feedback and maybe even emails/texts/calls home, and reporting achievement once learners have had time to do something about their learning.

So, my first suggestion is to start using those symbols in place of grades. Of course, the next step is to find a way to use portfolios, self-assessment, and self-grading, although you can now do that without worrying about this major obstacle. If you’ve got a particularly tricky situation, reach out and we’ll talk.