Why Teachers Should Grade Less Frequently

When Denise Pope was an English teacher, she’d spend hours jotting meticulous comments on student papers. More often than not, it was a fruitless endeavor.

“The first thing kids would do is go to the back of the paper, look at the grade, and never read my comments,” says Pope, now a senior lecturer at Stanford University and cofounder of Challenge Success. A 2021 study confirms that the problem is common—when students see a grade before they see feedback, the researchers report, they are more likely to ignore teacher feedback entirely, leading to a drop of two-thirds of a letter grade on future assignments.

Advocates of A–F or percentage grading rightly argue that grades provide students and their caregivers with a simple, bird’s-eye view of academic achievement and are also “one of the primary means of communication between institutions,” according to a 2014 study—allowing schools to make quick judgments about a student’s learning readiness. Compared with standardized tests, in fact, high school grades are a stronger measure of a student’s “capacity to resist momentary temptations, regulate emotions, and sustain effort across days, months, and years in pursuit of important goals,” crucial skills that predict college and career success, a 2019 study found.

But there are plenty of reasons to second-guess our collective investment in grades, as well, and to consider ways to deprioritize them. In the last decade, studies have cast doubt on many of the reputed benefits of grades, including how they affect student motivation and how accurately they reflect learning. For teachers as well, questions about grading obligations—and grading methodologies—have raised concerns about the sustainability and wisdom of common practices like collecting, checking, and providing feedback on every assignment.

One good way to look at grading, according to a holistic review of the research, is to consider the right balance between summative grades assigned by teachers and other productive activities, like low-stakes practice and peer-to-peer feedback. 

We pored over the research and found nine good reasons why—and in many cases, how—teachers can streamline their grading practices.

1. Less Feedback Is Better Feedback

The hours you commit to grading and commenting on every assignment and quiz are likely to be met with a shrug by your students. In a 2022 study, researchers confirmed that only 16 percent of college students accessed feedback on their online assignments, with steep declines as the semester came to a close. 

Focus on providing less feedback that’s more targeted. In a large-scale 2020 meta-analysis, researchers found that too much feedback is often “ignored, misunderstood, and of low value” to students. The best feedback helps students “understand [not only] what mistakes they made, but also why they made these mistakes and what they can do to avoid them the next time.”

Since students have a tendency to skim feedback, it’s better to take aim at a few high-impact areas for improvement. High-quality feedback is, first and foremost, useful—it doesn’t just correct errors but is timely, specific, and actionable in scope, and challenges the student to hone “the learning of new skills and tasks,” the researchers point out.

2. Fewer Grades Means Less Stress For Everyone

Time spent grading is often uncompensated, which is a large driver of teacher stress, according to a 2023 RAND report. Unlike many other professions with clear boundaries between work and personal life, teachers often choose “to spend time outside their contracted hours engaging in activities that could help them educate students more effectively.”

“After that first or second year, the workload becomes more manageable, but the hardest—and, to me, most stressful and distressing—part of the job remains: grading students’ work,” writes the former educator John Tierney, in The Atlantic. “It’s the part of the job that, in my opinion, induces the greatest uncertainty, discomfort, and angst.”

Student well-being, too, benefits from fewer grades. In a 2014 study, researchers pointed out that “grades appear to play on students’ fears of punishment or shame, or their desires to out-compete peers, as opposed to stimulating interest and enjoyment in learning tasks.” Meanwhile, a comprehensive 2021 study led by Denise Pope found that “grades, tests, and other assessments” were leading sources of stress, beating workload, homework, lack of sleep, and college plans by large margins.

Instead of stamping a grade on every assignment, consider lowering the stakes and deploying more practice tests, encouraging students to adopt rough draft thinking, and using formative assessment tools instead of high-stakes alternatives.

3. Grading Obligations Reduce Teacher Creativity and Innovation

How can you create truly outstanding lessons, update old pedagogical materials, and look for ways to connect the week’s learning to the lives of students? Finding engaging ways to convey knowledge within a discipline is the bread and butter of good teaching and requires a lot of preparation.

But in a 2022 survey that included measurements of various teacher activities, lesson planning and grading consumed virtually equal shares of time, and strategies that might unlock a school’s best teaching practices—collaborative planning, for example—were lost among other competing duties such as supervision, faculty meetings, and preparation for required federal and state assessment. An EducationWeek survey found similar numbers: K–12 teachers spent about five hours a week grading and giving feedback and about five hours planning and preparing.

That’s a dubious allocation of teaching time, according to a 2014 review of American grading practices. In fact, “the time and energy spent on grading has been often pinpointed as a key barrier to instructors becoming more innovative in their teaching,” depriving passionate educators of the opportunity to reflect on the structure or contents of their course, develop active learning activities, or prepare sharp, provocative questions for debate or discussion.

4. Grades Are Inherently Unstable Indicators

In a recent study of over 33,000 middle and high school report cards, almost 60 percent of final course grades failed to align with corresponding scores on standardized exams. Grading accuracy was all over the map: About two-thirds of the course grades were inflated—that is, they were higher than the standardized exam score by at least one letter grade—while one-third were significantly lower, indicating that teachers had underestimated the students’ knowledge. 

Good intentions won’t fix the issue. Every kind of bias slips into grading protocols, exploiting the kinds of cognitive shortcuts we all use to make hard decisions in the real world. Research, for example, shows that teachers unwittingly award higher grades to essays with good handwriting, associate being overweight with laziness and low academic potential, and are more likely to score students of color more harshly. Even crankiness can skew the results: A 2023 study found an unexplained 0.6-point drop in scores—coupled with a noticeable drop in politeness—as teachers made their way through an interminable stack of papers.

“In summary, grades often fail to provide reliable information about student learning,” according to a 2014 study. While essays, reports, and other written documents open up “greater opportunities for subjectivity,” it’s likely that “even multiple-choice tests, which can be graded with great consistency, have the potential to provide misleading information on student knowledge.”

5. Grading Conveys an Artificial Sense of Completion

Grades can feel like a stamp of approval—or disapproval—and signal to students that the work of learning is complete. To get students thinking deeply about their progress, try delaying grades, at least until they’ve had a chance to review their work, process your feedback, and think about how they can improve.

In a 2021 study, students who saw their grades first, followed by feedback a few days later, scored two-thirds of a letter grade lower than their peers who received feedback first. Students often develop an “an excessive focus on grades,” the researchers explain, and withholding grades—even for just a few days—gives them the space to make adjustments and turn in better work in the future.

6. Grading Reduces Opportunities for Student Practice

To develop great basketball players—or great writers—you need to strike the right balance between practice and feedback. 

In a 2014 study, German researcher Martin Lotze found that professional writers exhibited more signs of highly efficient, automated processes in an area of the brain associated with artistic skill than amateur writers. Writing well, concluded John Seabrook for the New Yorker, is “like playing the piano or dribbling a basketball.” In the end, “practice is the only path to mastery.” Longitudinal studies by Angela Duckworth also suggest that it’s repeated cycles of practice and failure, and not natural aptitude, that ultimately lead to mastery.

Teachers can sometimes let the tail wag the dog: They assign less writing work in social studies or English classes, for example, because they consider feedback more crucial than practice. For students, though, the lack of time to try, fail, and try again makes progress far less likely, especially for complex tasks like writing. Try short draft-writing techniques like ungraded seven-minute writes, and for larger projects, consider checking in only periodically to offer simple verbal or written feedback before grading a final draft.

7. Grades Are Less Motivating Than You Might Think

It’s possible that grades motivate high performers, but for average and struggling students, summative grades don’t seem to light a fire.

“Despite the conventional wisdom in education, grades don’t motivate students to do their best work, nor do they lead to better learning or performance,” write motivation researcher Chris Hulleman and science teacher Ian Kelleher, provocatively, in a 2020 article for Edutopia.

A 2018 analysis of university policies like traditional A–F grading, pass/fail grading, or narrative evaluations, meanwhile, concluded that “[traditional] grades enhanced anxiety and avoidance of challenging courses” but didn’t improve student motivation. By grading a bit less often and using low-stakes feedback with specific, actional next steps, you can “promote trust between instructors and students,” leading to greater academic ambition, the researchers write.

8. Peer Grading Helps You—and Students, Too

The act of grading itself is a learning opportunity. Asking students to grade their own work, or even each other’s, isn’t lazy—in fact, it can lead to meaningful improvements to learning.

In a sweeping 2022 meta-analysis, students who took the lead in grading classroom assignments exhibited “significantly better academic performance” across all age groups. Students also developed stronger metacognitive skills, developing the ability to “make judgments about their own and others’ work, identify the gap between their current performance and the desired standard, and take actions to close the gap.”

For best results, provide students with rubrics, mentor texts, and checklists to guide their feedback. By clearly laying out the qualities of high-quality work—narrative cohesion or a clear central claim supported by facts, for example—rubrics help students “compare their performance to salient features, generate feedback, self-reflect, make the appropriate choice, and take action,” researchers explain in a 2023 study.

9. More Types of Data Is Better

“A single assessment is just part of a larger ecosystem of information that can be used to determine student progress,” writes instructional coach and English language arts teacher Tyler Rablin. For a more accurate picture, Rablin uses a variety of strategies—one-on-one conferences and feedback portfolios, for example—to thoughtfully gauge students’ progress and point them in the right direction.

More data on student learning can also improve classroom instruction. In a 2020 study, robust assessment systems—ones that gave students multiple opportunities to demonstrate what they know, such as research projects or oral presentations followed by a Q&A—“helped teachers reflect on the ways that they could better support students,” which in turn “led to a continuous improvement approach to their instruction.”