My brief, unfair summary
At its best, the book Ungrading (Blum, 2020) and its authors
- Provide many blueprints, implementations, and reflections on ungrading practices.
- Address many practical difficulties of implementing these practices.
- Repeatedly make calls for revolution, and provide tools and recipes for making that happen.
- Encourage critical pedagogy.
- Come from a variety of disciplines and settings (K-12 vs post-secondary).
At its worst, the book and its authors
- Rely on unjustified assumptions and emotional arguments.
- Tend to hide or downplay the (serious) concerns related to ungrading.
- Never grapple with the critical scholarship or discuss the case of University of California, Santa Cruz that was gradeless for its first 35 years and then moved to traditional grading in 2000.
- Implement grading disguised as ungrading.
Mike Pawliuk - Mathematics 