Tag: grading

Called to an “A”: Vocation and Alternative Grading

This post reflects on how best to support students’ learning and vocational exploration even as we evaluate their work. At the NetVUE conference, the author of this post reflected on the similarities between the values that guide vocation and alternative grading and explored diverse strategies for fostering student growth through alternative grading methods. Emphasizing flexibility, self-awareness, and outward orientation, these approaches aim to create a supportive learning environment. By shifting from traditional grading, professors encourage students to connect their efforts to meaningful outcomes and vocational discernment.

At the 2026 NetVUE Conference this past March, I couldn’t stop thinking about how to meet learning outcomes while at the same time cherishing students and lingering with them along their educational journeys. At the post-keynote roundtable discussions, faculty colleagues shared how they do so: Some are more lenient with grades early in the semester to boost feelings of self-efficacy, while others are less lenient to help students realize they’re still worthy of being cherished even in moments when their effort isn’t their best.

This discussion reminded me that we share similar goals but have strikingly different ways to work toward them. Yet we all think about this in terms of giving letter grades.

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Vocation for Teachers Who Hate Grading

We know good feedback is precious: the voices of others often help us find our vocational ways, and comments on assignments can be one of the most effective conduits for mentorship. But because this work is so important, we can feel all the more sharply that our efforts at it are imperfect.

If you type “I hate grading” into google, you’ll get 5,800,000 hits. For many of us, evaluating students’ work is the part of our vocations that feels the least vocational. In part, that’s because there’s something fundamentally un-vocational in summing up students’ efforts to learn—their own current vocational work—with a letter or number. In part, it’s because grading reinforces power structures that most of us resist. But evaluation can also feel un-vocational because we just can’t do it as well as we want to. 

We know good feedback is precious: the voices of others often help us find our vocational ways, and comments on assignments can be one of the most effective conduits for mentorship. But because this work is so important, we can feel all the more sharply that our efforts at it are imperfect. We don’t have the time, perhaps we don’t have the wisdom or diplomatic savvy, to do it well enough. That’s true especially if we’re laboring in courses, course loads, or evaluation systems (like minimal GPAs for scholarships) that don’t fit our vision of vocation. Then the mountain of assignments waiting for our response becomes not an invitation to nurturing conversation but a burden, not the essence of teaching but a distraction from the aspects of teaching we value.

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