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Alternative Grading Practices

Alternative grading methods are as diverse as the instructors who implement them. This guide reviews the underlying principles of alternative grading and describes the similarities and differences between the various approaches.

Grading
Updated June 2026
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Adriana Streifer
Associate Director & Associate Professor
Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost
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Alternative Grading Schemes

UVA Center for Teaching Excellence

This resource summarizes a few alternatives to traditional grading processes and compares/contrasts the specifics of each approach.

Headshot of Adriana Streifer
Adriana Streifer

This resource summarizes a few alternatives to traditional grading processes and compares/contrasts the specifics of each approach.

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Alternative Grading Schemes

UVA Center for Teaching Excellence
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Alternative grading schemes are becoming increasingly popular, in large part due to their greater flexibility and customization than traditional methods.In general, alternative grading schemes prioritize transparency, a growth/progress orientation to learning, alignment between learning objectives and assessment practices, increased communication between instructors and students, and reduced power imbalances between the same. Despite these similarities, alternative grading schemes differ in the details. Here we summarize a few alternatives to traditional grading processes and compare/contrast the specifics of each approach.

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The Four Pillars of Alternative Grading

Grading for Growth

This blog post describes the similarities that unite all alternative grading methods.

Headshot of Adriana Streifer
Adriana Streifer
This blog post cuts through the confusion many instructors can experience when choosing which alternative grading practice to adopt. Rather than examine the details of any particular practice, this blog post articulates four principles (or pillars) that unite all alternative grading schemes.
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It seems smarter to focus on the overall ideas that unify these different approaches. So this week, rather than introduce another kind of grading practice, we’re going to pull back to a higher altitude and try to distill what all these ideas have in common and come up with a general framework for these practices. Not a “definition” of anything — there’s still too many idiosyncrasies and varied practices to hope for something that’s both precise and general — but instead a map, with room for interpretation, that stakes out some of the common ground that we seem to be walking together.

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Grading for Growth: A Guide to Alternative Grading Practices That Promote Authentic Learning and Student Engagement in Higher Education

David Clark and Robert Talbert

This book addresses the philosophies and values behind grading, examines alternative grading practices through the lens of educational equity, and offers a workbook to guide instructors as they develop alternative grading practices.

Headshot of Adriana Streifer
Adriana Streifer
This book not only defines alternative grading approaches and provides examples of them, it also unpacks the complicated history and philosophical problems with grading. In particular, "the four pillars of alternative grading" articulate key values and goals for any grading scheme.
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The entire culture built around grades and grading is toxic. The quest for a 4.0, the email requests to “bump up” one’s grade, the arguments over points awarded: None of these are actually about learning. But because grades seem to be inextricable from school, there appears to be no other way than the traditions we have. But what if there was a way? What if there was a way to think about grades built on growth over game-playing, learning over letters and numbers, and productive relation­ships over adversarial ones? What if we could address, if not entirely repair, so many of these problems, through a quiet revolution in the everyday task of grading? We believe that this way exists, and that’s why we are writing this book. We believe that a fundamentally better approach to grading is possible, and that any higher education faculty can help make it a reality.
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Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What to Do Instead)

Susan D. Blum

This book is a collection of essays from faculty who have found ways to eliminate grading or grade in untraditional ways. The introduction describes the motivations and aims of those who challenge traditional grading practices.

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Adriana Streifer

"Ungrading" is a capacious term—it is really more of an attitude or philosophy than a concrete practice. Learning about the beliefs, values, and practices of instructors who have implemented various forms of alternative grading can help instructors develop their own approaches.

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Though the destination tends to be generally the same, there is variation in the routes, the reasons, the contexts, and the specific ways various individuals at different levels of education enact our changes. This book is an effort to assemble some of the practices faculty have devised to question the apparent centrality of grades as an unchanging, unyielding fact of schooling... All of the authors included in this book are troubled by some of the consequences of and reasons for grades. It could be because grading dehumanizes and flattens nuances in students practices and understanding. It could be the mechanistic approach, derived from the factory model of education, that we wish to challenge. It could be that we are concerned about the fixation on grades, which leads to cheating, corner cutting, gaming the system, and a misplaced focus on accumulating points rather than on learning. It could be that people wish to be more responsive to individuals in the classroom...
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Common Forms of Alternative Grading

Grading for Growth

This blog post describes some of the different forms of alternative grading, and links to longer articles and books about each type. It's a good place to start if you want an overview of the different types of alternative grading.

Headshot of Adriana Streifer
Adriana Streifer
This blog post is a great place to start if you want to distinguish between types of alternative grading and learn about their goals and key principles. Each section contains links to articles, books, and web resources that provide deep dives into each type of alternative grading.
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There is a wide variety in alternative assessment methods, and even more names for them. You might have heard some of these names and wondered, “What is that?” In today’s post, I’m going to describe some of these approaches to assessment that *aren’t* standards-based grading, specifications grading, or things along those lines. I’ll take a look at their common features and differences with the forms of assessment that we more often discuss on this blog.
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