...I didn't have any thoughts on this until I was deeper into writing my Teaching Philosophy (and after making notes on a student-colleague's stateent -- notes which applied as much or more to my own progress on that statement as it did to his...)
Jesse Stommel says, on his website: "If your institution just continued grading during the pandemic, 'business as usual,' here's what all those grades were measuring:
..... - how well students and teachers 'pivoted' to online
..... - whether students had necessary access and support at home
..... - the ability of students to 'perform' in a crisis"
That's fair. I discovered my own method of teaching, during a pandemic, and like most teachers, I wasn't trying to invent anything new (but got the impression that it might be fairly new to many people... again, this is probably many/most teachers' experience of shifting to online in a hurry)
I'm curious if I should have come to the same conclusions JS did after working with the method I developed, out of necessity. I didn't come to the same conclusions about grading overall, though. (And, on the level of values, the conclusions JS comes to seem less than novel, like it shouldn't take a pandemic to reach those conclusions. I went to UC Santa Cruz during the 90s for a bit, and we had Narrartive Evaluations instead of grades). I certainly never considered giving the mthod that worked best for me a name of its own... but should I? Just for reference? It was similarly discovered in a crisis as a reaction to the same thing he's observing (and I can join him when he goes further in saying that the inequalities were always there, so... etc. etc...)
My method does need a name though, it's something like "modular grading" I guess? The point of it is, many times the student will do work that doesn't fir the assignment, but is clearly germane to the topic and learning-outcomes of the course overall, so I question the knee-jerk reaction of saying "This wasn't the assignment, please read the instructions again and ask questions as needed" because doesn't it help everyone (including the instructor) much more to say "You actually did a different assignment, which I can give you credit for. I can see why you thought what you thought. But the assignment you attempted is important, too, because reasons and here's the difference..."
It's just so much more efficient than saying "this isn't the assignment" an inevitable number of times per semester per assignment. And it might, for all I know, open up the possibility of seeing whether the mistake was in the way I wrote out the instructions...
The rest of his observations are lovely, but I have trouble internalizing them, perhaps because with game design/game writing, I teach a subject that seems qualitative but isn't, really. "Narrative Design" doesn't mean "story-telling" or even "story structure", it means something more diagrammatic than that, and so it's less necessary for me to, as Stommel says, "Reflect the idiosyncratic, emotional character of learning" and more for me to be precise. I can embrace the open-endedness, though, by saying "Your homework was not X, because it was missing Y, and it had Z, which it didn't need. It was, however, Q." And even if there isn't a Q assignment coming up, maybe there should be? My thoughts on this are evolving... Ungrading is an important step in a particular direction, though...
I already have a problem with students working too hard on demonstrating skills which I need to assess in a "did they get parts A, B, and C? Great, check" rather than examining how much effort something took. I'm sure there are subtleties of Inoue's ideas that are eluding me, so I look forward to hearing others' thoughts on this...
I guess I can see the value in it, too, because I have come to accept that, like it or not, quantity is quality, so if someone does like 100 re-writes and sees no dividend from that much work, it's unlikely they're just plain not-developing... see, even as I type this, I feel sure I don't quite grasp (maybe bc I'm reluctant to) the concept...