Grades, tests, and homework consistently rank among students’ biggest sources of stress—and for many adolescents, they shape how capable they believe themselves to be. In this excerpt from The Teens Are Not Alright, Cathy Vatterott examines how traditional grading and assessment practices often intensify pressure and undermine students’ sense of competence. She explains that reducing stress does not require abandoning rigor, but rather rethinking how and when learning is evaluated. By shifting toward student-friendly approaches—like grading less, offering meaningful feedback, reducing high-stakes testing, and allowing opportunities for revisions—teachers can lower anxiety and help students see themselves as capable learners.
Rethinking Grading and Homework Practices
If we are concerned about student stress, and if we have decided to give students a degree of autonomy in their learning, does it follow that traditional practices such as grading, homework, and use of time should also change? The answer is that they don’t have to—but they should.
Giving students autonomy in how they learn and show their learning is an important step in meeting adolescent developmental needs and reducing stress, but it only goes so far. Adolescents’ identity is tied to their feelings of competence—the perception of how good they are at doing the job of school. Many traditional grading practices make it easy to feel incompetent at a time when there is so much pressure to get good grades. High achievers and perfectionists often have too much of their identity tied up in getting good grades. Anything less than an A may feel like failure to them, which ramps up their stress. And struggling students who don’t do well with traditional grading can easily adopt the fixed mindset that “I’m just not smart.” That mindset gets integrated into their identity as well, making them feel worse about themselves.
When high school students were asked to rate their top sources of stress, grades, tests, and other assessments topped the list, with overall workload and homework a close second (Challenge Success & NBC News, 2021). Those results remained relatively consistent before and during the pandemic. This is not surprising given the fact that traditional assessment and grading practices leave students with limited control over their grades.
How to Make Grades Less Stressful
We can neutralize much of the stressful effect of traditional grading by putting in place the following student-friendly practices.
Grade less and give more ungraded feedback.
When everything is graded—including first attempts and mistakes made while still learning—grades become a stressful endeavor for students. One bad grade can drive down a student’s average and seal their fate, GPA-wise. A low grade is the gift that keeps on giving...stress.
Traditional grading practices are set up so that there will be a limited number of high grades sheerly by virtue of student diversity. Those high grades are much more accessible to students who are quick studies, fast processors, and strong test takers. The artificial scarcity of high grades sets up competition, which compromises the ability of students to connect with one another and interferes with their need for belonging and peer acceptance.
But by grading less and providing more ungraded feedback on assignments, teachers can reinforce that learning is not an error-free process and that mistakes are a normal and necessary part of that process. Ideally, ungraded feedback would be a one-on-one conversation between teacher and student. Unlike written feedback, a face-to-face conversation makes it easy for the student to ask questions about the feedback in real time. For some long-term projects, such as research papers, taking time in class to give students one-on-one feedback is actually more efficient, is more personal, and feeds the teacher-student relationship. That said, to find class time to have the one-on-one requires the teacher to limit direct instruction and incorporate activity-based learning. Ungraded feedback could also take the form of whole-class discussion, self-assessment, or peer evaluation. Here’s how Wiliam (2007) describes one peer evaluation strategy:
Before students can turn in an assignment, they must trade papers with a peer. Each student then completes a “pre-flight checklist” by comparing the peer’s document against a list of required elements. For example, the pre-flight checklist for a lab report might require, among other things, a title, a date, diagrams drawn in pencil and labeled, and results that are clearly separated from conclusions. Only when the peer has signed off on the checklist can the work be turned in to the teacher. (p. 194)
No-count practice tests are also useful as feedback. Students can get feedback from practice tests by scoring their own papers and discussing their mistakes and misunderstandings in small groups or as a class. The scores are used strictly as feedback to the student and need not be recorded. If teachers wish to record practice test scores or other formative feedback, the score should be given zero weight in the gradebook. As a colleague of mine (who was also a coach) once said, “If we have a bad practice, we don’t show up at the game with negative 10 points on the scoreboard.”
Adolescents’ identity is tied to their feelings of competence—the perception of how good they are at doing the job of school.
Change the structure and conditions of in-class assessments.
One-shot tests and quizzes make assessment a high-stakes game. The test is at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday for everyone—whether a student is ready or not. Too bad if a student is having a bad day, did not study in the most efficient way, or anticipated multiple-choice but got essay questions. Too bad, too, if the assessment is time-based and some learners have slower working speeds than others: Everyone gets the same time to complete the test. It’s no wonder some students have test anxiety!
There are low-lift ways teachers can ease this anxiety. If some students struggle to complete a test in the time allotted, teachers might consider shortening the test, breaking up longer tests into two or three shorter tests given over consecutive days, or giving shorter quizzes more frequently. The teacher might also survey students for readiness prior to an assessment and, if many of them indicate they are not ready, the teacher could give additional formative assessments and feedback. Postponing an assessment for a few days not only gives students more time for learning but also often results in better student performance and less stress.
Provide multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery.
Thinking of a test as performance on demand, with no do-overs, is enough to ramp up anyone’s stress level. To reduce assessment stress, it is important to consider assessment as a process rather than an event. When we shift our mindset from “getting it right the first time” to simply “getting it right,” we not only enable students to experience competence, but we also reduce competition among students and allow our community of learners to develop, with everyone in pursuit of a common goal.
Offering retakes on assessments and revisions on assignments enables students to continue to learn and gives a chance of redemption for a poor first performance. There are caveats, however. When redoing assignments, students need to receive and follow specific feedback before submitting their revision. Similarly, assessment retakes require remediation. Allowing retakes with no evidence that additional learning has occurred is frustrating, time-consuming, and stressful for both students and teacher. Prior to retaking an assessment, students should first complete some form of remediation, such as watching and responding to a video, completing additional practice, meeting with the teacher for reteaching, or proposing their own method based on a self-assessment. Only then should students be eligible for a retake. Once the student has improved their performance, new information should replace the old information as opposed to being averaged with the first grade, as we assume the most recent evidence of learning is the most accurate.
The Teens Are Not Alright
In this thought-provoking resource for all middle and high school educators, Cathy Vatterott explores how schools can balance academics with adolescents' social, emotional, and physical needs.
