On not grading essays

This fall, in our first-year academic writing courses at the University of Basel English Department, Peter Burleigh and I have stopped grading the essays. We both feel liberated from the pressure of the grade. We still write detailed comments – and feel like the comments themselves are better than before, without taking more time to write. For the course evaluations, I asked the students to comment on not having grades, and all of them thought it was great. And I have been getting a lot more individual feedback about how useful the comments are – which might imply that the students are reading the comments more now than when the essays were graded. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 December 2024)