Grades are so central to education today that it can be difficult to imagine teaching and learning experiences without them. Conventional wisdom at UMBC whispers that students will not complete work unless it is clearly tied to points. What happens when educators move away from grading’s extrinsic rewards and work to cultivate intrinsic motivation and love for learning? What if you had other ways to give students feedback, motivate them, and still meet the registrar’s grade deadline? Explore these ideas with your colleagues in a discussion series of Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) by Susan Blum, 2020. Our first discussion focuses on:

• Blum’s “Introduction: Why Ungrade? Why Grade?” (pp. 1-22),
• Stommel’s “How to Ungrade” (Chapter 1, pp. 25-41), and
• Katapodis and Davidson’s “Contract Grading and Peer Review” (Chapter 7, pp. 105-122).

Please click “Going Virtually” below to reserve your seat for this session, and we will send you a Google calendar invitation with a WebEx link one hour before the session. If you register less than an hour before the session, you will receive the WebEx link when you register. Please email fdc@umbc.edu if you have any questions. If you have registered and find that you can no longer attend, please kindly release your spot so that others may attend. √ Counts toward the ALIT Certificate