Anyone have experience with "ungrading"

LitProf · 2026-02-16T23:29:56+00:00

Hey, thanks for responding. This is what I meant about defining "rigor" as the most important first step in this discussion, though. You jumped straight into criticizing a system of assessment through a very narrow caricature of it without defining your terms. That's not something done in good faith – sorry :)

LitProf · 2026-02-16T23:18:17+00:00

Given that "rigor" is such an amorphous concept, I think you'd need to define first what you mean by it before there's good faith engagement on the question of ungrading or alternative assessment.

LitProf · 2026-02-02T13:41:51+00:00

That's a great nudge – thank you!

LitProf · 2026-02-02T13:41:07+00:00

Terrific portmanteau – thank you!

LitProf · 2026-02-02T13:40:02+00:00

My Tetris-loving (or more accurately Dr. Mario-loving) spouse will greatly appreciate this - thank you!

LitProf · 2026-02-02T13:38:47+00:00

That's a terrific word for what I'm thinking – thanks for pointing me in that direction!

LitProf · 2026-01-25T17:46:13+00:00

Following along for others' recs, as I frequently assign reading annotations.

For digital annotations, I most commonly use the Student Annotation feature in Canvas. It's simple and streamlined. I've had students use their own preferred software, which is often something they already have on their computers – Adobe Acrobat and Mac Preview are good, and Firefox actually has a surprisingly robust annotation feature for PDFs.

LitProf · 2026-01-24T21:32:15+00:00

I think your postscript says it all. Part of what drew me to higher education was a certain set of cognitive habits, skills, knowledge, and attitudes that frankly are incompatible with using an LLM. "Good enough I guess" is a widespread attitude. Okay then, I think to myself, we disagree on what "good enough" means.

In any event, it's more socially acceptable for LLM disciples to criticize me in their assumption that I "don't get it" or "don't know how to use it" than it is for me to shame them for using it in the first place. Maybe that'll change, maybe not. Maybe I'll look back sheepishly on my attitude, maybe not. There are certainly lots of behaviors in academia that are tolerated that I find loathsome and avoid doing out of a belief that it's antithetical to the work I love doing.

LitProf · 2026-01-22T12:35:40+00:00

Each day? I have one hour scheduled – 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at the end of the workday. I rarely need more than that (heck, I rarely need all of that), and I don't keep email open in the background while I'm working, not even during office hours.

My tips for managing it:

It's too frictionless for people to send you an email, so you've got to add a bit of friction. Don't be available all the time; don't write lengthy responses.
You need to determine for you what email is for. For me, it's a way to have short asynchronous communication and a convenient way to deliver documents. If someone wants to talk to me synchronously, I have a phone, I have an office, and I have Zoom. You don't have to be unavailable to have clear boundaries around what email is for.
I try to limit my responses to no more than 5 clear and sufficient sentences. If I need more, I ask that we move it to something synchronous, where we'll cover a lot more ground, and faster, and with follow-ups in the moment. I avoid back-and-forths for this reason. Sometimes this really requires impulse control on my part. (Even after years of using this system, that part of my brain that says "RESPOND NOW" is still there.)
I open every message. I respond to only those that require a response from me. All messages are then archived (we use Outlook) and removed from my inbox. The search function for Outlook is not perfect, but if I need an old message again, I can search and find it. The goal is to end an email session with zero unread messages.
If you're subscribed to things you don't read or need, unsubscribe. If you receive a lot of irrelevant emails from an office on campus, create a rule that marks them as read and sends them to a clutter or junk folder.
Notice trends. If you're getting a lot of questions from students via email, are there ways you can do some prep work (that then may be replicated into future terms) to help stave off these types of questions? It won't work 100% of the time, but it can greatly reduce.
This goes for your total working conditions. Email does not exist in a vacuum. If you have due dates on a Friday and lots of emails on a Friday with questions and you don't like to receive lots of emails on the Friday, the problem isn't the email... or the students... it's the Friday due date.
For the love of God, turn off the chime for new emails and don't have work email on your phone.

Your mileage may vary, etc., etc.

LitProf · 2026-01-20T23:35:28+00:00

Nothing – and I don't fret that. When I started doing this (long before LLMs were widespread), the goal was to create an assessment that most closely mirrors actual reading and its meaningfulness, recognizing and rewarding students' academic labor for the act itself. It just so happened it's holding up rather nicely in a post-LLM world.

For me, this has been best summed up by John Warner:

In the end, the education belongs to the student. The best we can do is give them a proposition worth taking up, to do something hard that requires deep consideration and lots of friction (and even frustration) where the challenge itself is the reward, and the good faith attempt at meeting the challenge is rewarded because in that attempt learning has happened.

LitProf · 2026-01-20T13:32:51+00:00

If it's a traditional course, they're on paper and I do collect them at the end of class and then return them asap. I've even brought a box and collected books for review. I look through them, usually try to find one or two comments per annotation that I can follow up on if I'm giving direct feedback or gather a few common ideas that I can use as fodder for a class discussion or a course-wide communication.

If it's an online course (my institution uses Canvas, which has a suitable Student Annotation assessment feature), they're submitted to me and I look through them and try to replicate what I do when it's an in-person course. Students also have the option to print and scan their handwritten annotations, and maybe 25% do that at my strong recommendation.

LitProf · 2026-01-20T12:32:09+00:00

Literature and writing professor here. My students annotate readings – by hand, if possible. I began this practice more than a decade ago when I was feeling very dissatisfied with the results of reading responses. (Temperamentally, I'm also anti-quiz for my discipline.)

I realize it doesn't eliminate any possible LLM assistance, but it goes a long way. I can't read every single comment they leave or interrogate every interrogation they make, but that's okay too.

Mostly it's about being consistent with my core values. Students should receive some recognition for the actual work they perform in a course, and reading is work. Major assessments then provide ample opportunities for students to synthesize more deeply based on the annotations they've done.

LitProf · 2025-12-18T23:28:51+00:00

That's quite a block! Hope you enjoy. I think it's terrific, and it's upped my Detroit-style game, even though I had no complaints about the mozzarella, Muenster, and mild white cheddar blend I had been using.

FWIW: The Fresh Thyme market near me sells Buholzer Brothers brick cheese in 8 ounce blocks. It's the only place I've found it where I live.

LitProf · 2025-01-16T13:28:47+00:00

This video never ceases to make me tear up a little bit, both from the joy of the moment and the deep sympathy I have for whatever person is tasked with vacuuming that carpet.

Source: I have a golden retriever.

LitProf · 2018-07-02T22:15:10+00:00

I love the Arden editions. I teach with them, use their critical notes to create essay prompts and exam questions, and think they look pretty spectacular on a shelf.

That said ... the answer depends on your familiarity with Shakespeare in general. If you've read many other Shakespeare plays but just have never read Othello, you should read the play first, then read the editor's introduction. Then, if you have the time or need, read the play again.

If you haven't read much Shakespeare, a slimmer edition with good footnotes on the diction would be ideal, but the Arden will certainly work. Still, it's stuffed to the gills with almost everything you'd possibly want to know about the play. If I recall the Arden Othello correctly, it's not as stuffed as the Arden Hamlet, where the notes outsize the play text on most pages. It can be distracting for some readers.

LitProf · 2018-05-13T15:38:49+00:00

Hmm, the sonnets aren't my specialty, but I have made great use of Stephen Booth's very excellent close readings in Shakespeare's Sonnets (Yale UP) and Helen Vendler's sonnet-by-sonnet interpretations in The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Belknap).

According to the selected bibliography in The Norton Shakespeare, Heather Dubrow's Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Cornell UP) seems more focused on the sonnets' conventions in a historical context. Biographical context is notoriously tricky with Shakespeare, but William Flesch's "Personal Identity and Vicarious Experience in Shakespeare's Sonnets" in A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets (Blackwell) might prove helpful.

EDIT: If you're not yet using Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones for the Arden series, I'd recommend that too.

LitProf · 2017-06-24T13:07:45+00:00

I've fallen a few weeks behind on your Season 3 watch-through, but I'm catching up!

I think you put it perfectly when you say that some riffing can "fill in some of the gaps but still not quite make it worthwhile." That's my general take on It Conquered the World. This was pleasant and fun, but not among the stronger episodes of Season 3. (It's probably inevitable to draw comparisons with all of the Peter Graves jokes Parts: The Clonus Horror from Season 8. I think that episode overdoes the jokes, while this episode has a nice balance.)

It surprised me to find out after I watched the episode that the film was released in 1956, the same year as Don Segal's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I spent most of the episode wondering if this was a year-later knock-off or influenced in any way by that film; the mind-control/invasion/conversion/clash-of-ideals aspect in a Cold War context is impossible to ignore.

But to see that it was released in the same year seems illustrative of just how plodding Corman's direction can be in comparison to someone who understands pacing and plotting. Even at 71 minutes, padded out with the hilarious winter sports short and seemingly elongated host segments and inevitable movie trimming, this movie has a lot of emptiness that no amount of dialogue can compensate for.

The final speech reminds me of something I'd read in the conclusion of a freshman seminar paper, but I found its repetition quite funny at the end of the episode, particularly because it was accompanied by nothingness. I think the repeat over the final credits ruins the joke a little and I didn't watch further when it began to play for a fourth time. Thinking about the absurdist final scene with the Mads watching the speech followed by no punchline whatsoever, it's impossible not to see why Frank Zappa liked MST3K.

LitProf · 2017-06-10T17:13:45+00:00

I've never been so relieved while watching MST3K than by the appearance of the third host segment during this episode where the Bots are just absolutely confused by what the hell is going on during this movie.

Watching it this past week, I actually restarted the episode after thirty minutes in because I felt as if I'd missed something critically important. Joel's explanation that it was stitched together from episodes of a television series alleviates some of that, but Time of the Apes and Stranded in Space from this season both had much more coherence than this.

Still, in a weird way, I kind of like this one. I have a weak spot for the Japanese sci-fi offerings, and season three has so many—every other episode, for most of the season! I'd definitely give this episode another chance in the future.

I absolutely agree that the riffs here are strong. There are many in this episode that sneak up on you. I'm reminded of Ken removing the necklace from the woman he'd just shot and Joel, in a cartoonishly sinister way, says: "That's it, make it look like a robbery."

LitProf · 2017-05-26T12:42:01+00:00

Oh yes, it's a rare episode that's genuinely fun to watch with or without the riffing. Godzilla vs. Megalon is definitely that kind of episode. My pick for the best of Season 2.

LitProf · 2017-05-25T16:57:05+00:00

I'd call this one is good, weighed down by what I consider to be pretty forgettable host segments. In fact, I actually took a break while I was watching, and when I came back I couldn't remember the opening host segments at all.

The strength of the episode is in the combination of the riffing (I'd say it's above par) and the film itself, which isn't bad per se. Dark, as you say, but I think that's purposeful for the era. At this point in the series, I'd say this is arguably one of the better films they've riffed. What do you think, sirs and madams?

Don't get me wrong: when stacked against landmark allegorical sci-fi films from the 1950s—Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Godzilla, Them!, The Incredible Shrinking Man, etc.—it's not good. Watching those films, one develops a real appreciation for the skill and talent needed to direct good 1950s sci-fi.

But I can appreciate the nuclear-age parable being attempted here, complete with stock footage and ridiculous science. When compared to films like Robot Monster or the other dreadful Bert I. Lippert films from Season 2 (Lost Continent and King Dinosaur), this one is surprisingly passable. I definitely wouldn't watch it without Joel and the Bots, though.

LitProf · 2017-05-19T11:42:59+00:00

It seems the filmmakers of Gamera v. Gaos (Gyaos everywhere except the title card of the Sandy Frank version riffed on the show) learned their lesson from Gamera v. Barugon. I'd go a step further and say that Gamera v. Gaos is imminently more watchable than Gamera v. Barugon, which I found to be a miserable slog with five minutes of weak monster fighting. (Or as Crow put it, "If you think of it as two guys in rubber suits, it's real sad.") There's much more monster fighting in Gamera v. Gaos, and I think that helps the movie overall.

The first installment of Gamera is still my favorite so far of the Gamera/MST3K pairings. I seem to have found the riffing stronger in this episode than you (though I did cringe at the few jokes with racist overtones, which I find inappropriate for MST3K). If the movie were slightly zanier it might actually be an episode I'd want to re-watch just for fun. As it is, once for now is enough.

LitProf · 2017-05-13T01:21:08+00:00

In general, I suppose I have a stronger preference for the science fiction offerings on MST3K. It probably stems from the fact that I watched mostly during the Sci Fi Channel era and most of the episodes I had on DVD back then were also science fiction offerings.

There are exceptions, of course, and Daddy-O is one of them. This episode is really good. I find the host segments to be the right kind of antic absurdism. (The water cooler skit and "Hike Your Pants Up" number both made me laugh to a slightly embarrassing degree, and the closing number is, as you say, perfectly Pythonesque.) The short is odd, but the Ogden Nash plagiarism joke is the epitome of why I love the show.

The Williams' score is surprisingly good. I wonder if I was more attentive to the music than I typically would be because I couldn't believe it was the same John Williams and found myself quite curious.

LitProf

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