Higher Education Research & Development

Beyond grades

This special issue reaches beyond grades as the dominant way of representing what students can do in higher education. If we were to reassemble how student achievement is institutionally represented, what might 'grades’ – or whatever emerges after them – look like?

Numerical and letter grades have been critiqued for a long time, not least because they provide one-dimensional and ‘flat’ representations of what students can do (Nieminen et al., 2026a). What does a ‘B–‘, ’79.3%’, or ‘Pass’ tell us about student learning and capabilities? Despite widely reported criticism, grading systems persist in most higher education contexts. Amid many recent calls to rethink, redesign, reimagine and innovate assessment, much less attention has been paid to grading systems (Nieminen et al., 2026b). As a notable example, the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has provoked global debates on the need to redesign learning objectives and standards (what students should learn) and assessment tasks (how such learning could be captured and assured), yet there is a critical silence regarding the final representation of what students can do – grades. As Ajjawi and Boud (2023) have argued, there is a need for innovation in how student achievement is recognised and represented. What kinds of novel theories, concepts and ideas could help us move beyond grades?

There is ample existing literature on ‘alternative grading’ (Hackerson et al., 2024), such as ungrading and standards-based grading, yet this work has focused on small-scale innovations in classrooms and has rarely promoted institutional, system-wide change in how student achievement is recognised. There are some institutional and disciplinary exceptions, such as medical education programs that often make use of pass/fail grading scales and narrative evaluations (Iyer et al., 2025). Nevertheless, categorical and hierarchical grading systems remain the norm in most higher education sectors.

This special issue aims to reach beyond critiquing past practices by opening up new visions and practices. It brings together diverse forms of expertise, welcoming submissions from, for example, critical/sociological analyses of higher education, educational psychology, policy studies, and assessment and feedback studies. We invite both conceptual and empirical contributions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

• Novel conceptualisations of ‘grades’ and institutional representations of student achievement more broadly
• Critical investigations of learning objectives 
• Alternative representations of achievement in programs and university certifications
• Representations of achievement in transitions to workplace
• The distorting effects of the non-educational use of grades (e.g. for selection/short-listing purposes)
• Student voice in portraying their own achievement (e.g. self- and peer-assessment, student partnership in assessment design)
• Issues of power, ethics and agency in how student achievement is represented
• The role of language and numbers in representations of achievement
• Social effects of grading on, for example, student identities, motivation, learning, and well-being
• Longitudinal representations of student achievement over time
• Policy analyses and media representations of grades
• Issues of inclusion, equity and social justice in representation of students’ achievement
• Decolonial approaches to how student achievement is represented
• Representation of student achievement in an age of Artificial Intelligence

Some of the topics above refer to ‘grades’ as we currently know them, whereas others reach beyond grades to explore alternatives to representing and recognising student achievement. We welcome both sorts of submissions yet note that the special issue aims to be generative. Conceptual critiques and empirical investigations of current grading practices will be considered only if they yield novel insights.