Is grading academic writing inherently racist?

The consequences of awarding an A for effort

Jan 03, 2023

It’s that time of the year when spring syllabi are due: a time when I used to think of Al Swearengen’s line from Deadwood: “Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.”

In the old days, or so they say, most of the grading happened at the end of the term with a high-stakes exam or research paper. That made for simpler scheduling. But for at least a generation professors have balanced formal writing with informal assignments to work through a more developmental learning process. That approach requires a great deal more planning and infinitely more grading, and when it is multiplied across three, four, or five courses it can be overwhelming. By the time I left academe, many of my colleagues were recording 30-40 separate grades per student by semester’s end.

Small wonder, then, that some writing instructors are gravitating toward a new trend: labor-based grading. If that sounds even more arduous, think again. The system is meant to be labor-saving for the instructor and stress-reducing for the student, and its growing popularity owes in part to relaxed standards during the COVID crisis. I read about the trend recently in U.S. News and World Report, but the concept dates back at least twenty years, because Composition and Rhetoric faculty used a form of it when I was a graduate student. The idea in the late 1990s and early 2000s was to break down the hierarchy between teacher and student by negotiating a grading contract. Students could advocate for how much weight to give to formal assignments, compared to attendance, participation, and workshop drafts, and the instructor would try to meet them halfway. That wasn’t really an enormous paradigm shift, since a passing grade still required a minimal level of competence in formal writing.

But labor-based grading means something very different now. According to its leading proponent, Asao B. Inoue, the underlying assumption is that “[i]t’s better to separate the course grade from how and what students learn in the course.” He’s not kidding. I’ll let him say it again: in his labor-based grading contracts, “how anyone judges writing quality is divorced from how final course grades are determined.”

How are labor-based grades calculated, then? Largely by participatory measures: attendance, discussion, workshop feedback, and completion of assignments. The actual writing could be completely incoherent and a student could still earn a B. If this seems too shocking to be true, Inoue is in demand as a consultant for writing pedagogy. He gave the Chair’s Address at the 2019 National Council of Teachers of English (see the video or the full text here). In fact, his influence on the state of Washington is so profound that half of the community and technical colleges there either presently offer or are planning to offer English courses with labor-based grading.

I find labor-based grading a dangerous trend for many reasons, as I’ll explain. But I’m writing about it today because I’m baffled by how labor-based grades can coexist with academic assessment. That is, how can institutions that ask their faculty to measure student progress, either to earn accreditation or to evaluate teaching effectiveness, allow some courses to dispense with formal evaluation of academic achievement altogether? I am no fan of assessment. But a course with labor-based grades yields no data whatsoever about whether students are writing better thesis statements or mastering skills like organization or paraphrase. In fact, I’m at a loss to explain how any institution that supports labor-based grading contracts can justify charging tuition for writing courses where there is no evaluation of structure, clarity, or depth of evidence, not to mention basic grammar and spelling, in student work.

You might wonder, reasonably, why I care about this issue at all, since I am no longer a member of an academic department (except symbolically as a Professor Emeritus of English). As a recovering academic, shouldn’t I take a few deep cleansing breaths and turn my attention to more affirming things? I suppose I keep circling back to the issues plaguing academe like the survivor of a car crash who revisits the scene of the accident trying to make sense of it. Only in this scenario the pile-up is still happening — and somewhere in the wreckage is the discipline that I still love and that I’m not ready to abandon.

What’s a grade for, anyway?

One of the requirements for teaching first-year composition at the University of Nebraska when I was a Ph.D. student was completing a seminar on Composition Theory. At the time, I found it refreshing to consider a portfolio method for a writing class, where I could give students credit for working through a series of drafts and revisions, rather than placing all of the weight on the final, polished version.

I still believe in the spirit of that philosophy. First thoughts are rarely best thoughts. Most people see the quality of their writing improve if they allow themselves space to experiment — not just at the brainstorming stage, but also throughout a robust revision process. Writing typically has more freshness if you begin with a question you don’t know the answer to and write your way toward discovery than it does if you begin with a dogma that remains unchanged from the first to last sentence. And it is both liberating and smart to place grammar concerns where they belong: near the end of the writing process.

Grading the writing process itself is a pragmatic way to ensure that students experiment with a more effective writing method than tweaking a rough draft into a final draft at the last minute. Students are typically happier knowing that their hard work is valued in a concrete way and that they are not solely judged on whether they have mastered documentation style. Many literature instructors incorporate similar methods by giving completion credit for reading responses to ensure preparation for discussion, such as the examples below.

screen shot of reading responses — Screen shot from my Illness and Health in Literature course in 2021.

But I rarely saw evidence that the steps I recommended in composition courses translated into better habits when students took courses that graded only formal writing. And even if they did, there was no guarantee that the work produced was necessarily stronger. I’ll never forget the day during my first year as a tenure-track professor when a senior colleague in History knocked on my door. “I’ve just been speaking to Taylor,” he said. “He took your composition class last year and said that you gave him an A. But I’ve been grading his research papers all semester, and I wonder how that can possibly be?”

My colleague was as kind as he could be, and we both were trying to balance Taylor’s best interests with high standards. But the conversation made me confront, for the first time, the absurdity of recording a course grade that offered no reliable indicator of actual competence. Taylor [not his real name] was a hard worker, an eager participant, generally a delight to have in class. But his paragraphs rarely hewed to a main idea, the thesis wobbled throughout the body of the paper, and the grammatical concerns were often serious enough to create conceptual confusion, which is the opposite of what good writing should do. I remember feeling, after that conversation with my colleague, that I had essentially given Taylor an A for effort. Which was something quite different from meaningfully assessing his progress in formal writing.

Decolonizing the grade

If Asao Inoue had been in my position, he would have interpreted the exchange much differently. My senior colleague would have been a symbol of patriarchy and “white language supremacy through judgment practices.” Inoue’s book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, is available for free at the Writing Across the Curriculum website at Colorado State University. In it, he argues that traditional grading in writing courses perpetuates a “white racial habitus,” or a white way of perceiving and inhabiting the world.

In place of the term Standard Written English, Inoue prefers Habits of White Language (HOWL for short). Among these alleged Habits of White Language are preferences for “clarity, order, and control” and “an individualized, rational, controlled self.” As a counterpoint, Inoue cites Dead Prez’s “They Schools.” The songwriters make an interesting point about how employability isn’t necessarily a path to mobility in an inequitable society:

Cuz see the schools ain’t teachin us nothin
They ain’t teachin us nothin but how to be slaves and hard workers
For white people to build up they shit
Make they businesses successful while it’s exploitin us

However, the lyrics also make sweeping claims about the school to prison pipeline, dismiss the entire curriculum out of hand as racist, and level a blanket accusation at teachers for contributing to an oppressive conspiracy. Inoue very generously concludes: “So despite, and even because of, the oppressive white system that determines failure for the Black body in a white supremacist U.S. society, the Black male voices of stic.man and M-1 declare their own agency and choice to learn against or in spite of those circumstances through observing and participating.”

Inoue’s argument is frustrating because it is a mix of ad hominem judgments and straw opponents. The combination of these two modes automatically negates counterpoints as racist. This is also how Robin DiAngelo’s thesis about white fragility works: if you sit through a mandatory training on racism silently, you are manifesting fragility by withdrawing. If you dissent or react emotionally, you are manifesting fragility because you can’t take the truth. The only way to avoid manifesting predictable fragility is to agree unreservedly with the argument about your fragility.

Rigged conversations of this kind, which might look like open dialogue but instead seek a rehearsed consensus on a predetermined conclusion, lie at the heart of why critical race theory continues to provoke outrage, even if the backlash is often equally rigid and misguided. This polarity has led to a paralysis in the humanities regarding antiracist pedagogy (and, as the president of Penn State University is discovering, in academic leadership). One can’t easily disagree with Inoue without being categorized as a white language supremacist. This is a shame, because it means that those who voice objection to a practice like labor-based grading, like Ben Shapiro and Larry Elder, typically do so for their own echo chambers. And so the camps grow more strident and simplified. In conversations like these I have no ideological home. In fact, I wonder if I have an audience at all.

What I see as questions of genre and audience, Inoue sees as markers of a colonized classroom. He says it quite directly: “[W]hite language supremacy is a condition and outcome structured in assessment ecologies in such a way as to function simultaneously as an ideal and as the norm.” Initially I thought Inoue might be right about traditional grading deriving from Western ideals. But it made me wonder how universities grade in countries with more ancient written traditions than English. Presumably anyone trying to record a labor-based grade for a course at Peking University in Beijing or for a writing course at Qatar University, would be summarily dismissed from the faculty. A student from rural China or Saudi Arabia would understand that a university audience requires different language conventions from their folk communities and would expect their professors to hold them to the equivalent of Standard Written Chinese or Modern Standard Arabic. Are these grading systems equally representative of colonialism, or do they reflect a more universal notion that rigor in higher education requires professional value judgments of more than effort?

There are inevitable power dynamics to grading, and these are compounded by inequitable representation within the faculty ranks. My corrections to student writing carried different cultural weight with students of color than with Taylor, a white farm kid, even if I felt that many writing challenges were comparable across demographics and that the standard I was applying was consistent. However, it is a very different thing to claim that formal evaluation of academic writing is, itself, a racist behavior, and that a course grade — which everyone outside of a university takes to be a measure of competence — has no relationship whatsoever to the quality of work a student did for a course that explicitly satisfies graduation requirements for writing.

slide with quote about grades and white supremacy — From “Ungrading or Labor Based Grading,” Professor Justin Bendell, University of New Mexico-Valencia

I believe that the pursuit of excellence can be a potentially unifying endeavor, since every culture and subculture has its traditions of mastery. Professional writing is no one’s native language — it has a set of conventions that might be understood as a craft. In the traditional liberal arts, this craft is more than a whimsical set of rhetorical tools: it is a way to demonstrate reliability, a way to question one’s own assumptions, a way to humbly participate in the unending conversation about what it means to be human or, more simply, to be.

Defending the craft of formal writing need not require a rigid formalism. Many of the principles of strong academic writing are evident in works as various as Yo-Yo Ma’s meditation on artistry and empathy, Majora Carter’s argument for green urban spaces in Reclaiming Your Neighborhood, and Sandra Steingraber’s exposé of corporate greed in “The Pirates of Illiopolis.” But if the craft itself is corrupt at the root, and if excellence as defined by that craft is a form of tyranny, then it is difficult to imagine how humanities disciplines can survive. The conventional English, History, or Philosophy department instead resembles the powerless individuals that one finds in the work of Stephen Crane or Charlotte Perkins Gilman: victim to overwhelming external forces and also to internal rebellions of the body and mind.

Perhaps Stanley Fish is right that craft alone isn’t enough to sell the humanities to a skeptical public:

“Instrumental arguments, arguments that assert the utility of humanistic study, become strained after a very short while; the moment you leave behind measurable skills like the ability to write a memo or a report or add a column of figures and move to a justification of the skills necessary to decode a religious lyric written by the Anglican poet George Herbert, the game is likely to be lost.”

The utilitarian argument is hard enough to make to market-obsessed administrators, but when members of your own discipline are saying that decoding Herbert’s poetry is an act of white supremacy, even the shaky leg you were standing on is lopped off at the knee.

Nothing but hard workers

If Inoue’s courses achieve their goal, students take full ownership of their learning. They write without fear of failure, experiment freely, and achieve more than they would have with the threat of a grade hanging over their heads. Inoue does not trouble himself overly with students who attempt to do the minimum: he truly believes that compassion and positive suggestions will accomplish more than coercion. As a Romantic, I largely agree that excellent teaching requires moving students far beyond the rubric.

But make no mistake: Inoue’s method is not simply another way to achieve the same academic result that other teachers do through traditional grading. Labor is the only standard the course demands. Inoue says it plainly: “Standards-based grades are how our world and schools have become unjust.” When he fields questions from those who worry about holding their students to high standards while using labor-based grading contracts, Inoue hears them really asking: “How can I as the teacher hold my students to a dominant white middle-class habitus as the standard of discourse in a labor-based grading contract ecology? Or how can I have my white language supremacist cake and eat it too?”

This post was inspired, in part, by a question about how Inoue’s system could coexist with the culture of academic assessment. The two seem categorically at odds. However, one might say that both systems strive to level the playing field between teachers and students. The primary goal of academic assessment, as a means of earning accreditation, is to demonstrate that students are meeting benchmarks and that teachers are not derelict in their duties. Rubrics of this sort rarely acknowledge distinction in either teaching or learning. They place higher premiums on standardization and alignment than on excellence because they are, by definition, seeking a baseline. In my experience, it is very unusual for a student who has been admitted to college, who mostly comes to class, and who completes assignments, to fall short of these assessment metrics. Baseline competency is the standard for employability. In fact, many argue that employability is the chief indicator of whether college is doing right by its graduates.

For someone who scorns an educational system that turns out nothing but “slaves and hard workers,” Inoue places an unusually high premium on labor. His grading contracts require the kind of strict compliance that employers do: come to work, have a good attitude, complete the projects assigned to you. Perhaps coincidentally, these dispositions also overlap with good retention, which is also a chief concern for assessment-minded admins. Inoue’s students aren’t going to drop out. They’ll keep paying their tuition. Labor-based grading might even be understood as an extreme version of transactional education: you pay this amount and I cash you out at commencement. If everyone is happy with the arrangement, who is to object?

The problem with traditional grading methods, Inoue says, is that they reward the already-privileged and penalize the already-oppressed. Yet if Inoue’s courses offer no skill acquisition other than reliable labor, it’s hard to see how his method closes the privilege gap other than by making it easier to accumulate college credits. In fact, you might say that he widens the gap by leaving some students with the impression that employers will give them an A for effort, regardless of quality. In that case, what students will have received from a labor-based writing course is a very costly delusion about their empowerment.

In a video I used to show to my writing classes, a composition instructor recalls one of his undergraduate professors writing a single comment on his research paper: “wooden.” Somehow he had written a wooden paper, whatever that meant, and that was the only justification for the grade given. That system allowed all manner of prejudice to run rampant, and I can’t imagine anyone defending it now. But it hasn’t been the standard grading method in at least two generations. I began to think of myself more as an athletic coach near the end of my teaching. The grading rubric set a high bar, and then we cheered each other on through the discussions and workshops, the way teammates push each other through drills and celebrate major breakthroughs. I often used a line from Adrienne Rich for inspiration: “the most affirming thing anyone can do for you is demand that you push yourself further, show you the range of what you can do.” But there has to be a standard that one is reaching toward for words like “further” and “range” to have any meaning at all.

That standard should remain open for debate and should expand and evolve as the debate diversifies. But to dispense with the standard altogether, or to redefine the standard so thoroughly that it no longer measures the writing itself, is suicidal to the discipline. One might even say that labor-based grading is the best way to ensure that universities stop offering writing courses altogether.

The Recovering Academic

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