(517c) Deadlines and Ungrading: The Impact of Flexibility on Student Stress and Productivity

Ungrading provides an approach that shifts the emphasis of each course onto learning and what students should be able to do at the end of a course, as opposed to focusing students' mindsets on what they need to do to get a certain grade and defining success by the grade they have received. Grades are de-emphasized for greater focus on how well students have learned, processed, and applied the instruction in the course, through means such as greater levels of feedback and discussion with each other and the instructor. There are many approaches to ungrading, such as contract grading, mastery-based grading, portfolios, and self-assessment, but the broader approach allows an instructor to provide less stressful, more equitable assessment.

Additionally, studies have shown the importance of allowing flexibile deadlines with respect to the submission of student work. Students can benefit from having greater means of balancing their work and their personal lives, and the increased quality of life will enable them to achieve greater levels of success in their work and learn more from their academic studies. Flexible deadlines can also be effectively implemented through and ungrading approach, providing an additional approach to assessment that can further improve the student experience and decrease student stress and anxiety.

In a process control course and a mass and energy balances course, an ungrading approach was implemented allowing students to self-determine the assignments they would complete and how many assignments to complete, with all student deliverables culminating in one portfolio of demonstrated work by the end of the semester. Exams were eliminated in favor of the portfolio approach, and deadlines were reduced and made flexible throughout the course. Students were highly productive, completing a greater number of assignments correctly than the number of assignments that would have even been assigned in a more traditionally assessed semester. However, student feedback indicated that having minimal deadlines led to procrastination and was stress-inducing in its own way. In more recent iterations of both courses, students were given different intermediate deadlines for work to be submitted throughout the semester for preliminary feedback, in an effort to study the impact of varying flexibility on students' productivity. The results of these efforts over three semesters, analysis, and student feedback, will be discussed in this paper.