English alum flunks grades in new book
Jesse Stommel compiles two decades of eyebrow-raising in Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop
It was the summer of 2023, sometime in June or July, and Jesse Stommel (PhD, English ‘10) had big weekend plans.
He said to his husband, “I’m going to write a book this weekend”—a book about grades, in particular, and all the trouble they’ve caused.
It was a tall order for such a short period of time, no doubt, but it wasn’t as though Stommel were starting from scratch. He’d been taking a critical eye to grades for two decades and had published numerous essays on the topic, several of which had been read by tens of thousands of people on .