Why I Stopped Grading Homework—and What Happened Instead
Tuesday, 11:42 p.m. The email came in with the subject line “Question about tonight’s homework.” I almost didn’t open it until morning. But I did. It was from a mom I’ll call Dana. Her daughter, a sixth grader, had been crying at the kitchen table since 9:30 over a math worksheet that should have taken twenty minutes. Dana wanted to know if I could look at it and tell her whether her daughter had “done it right,” because if not, she would be crushed to see a bad grade in the gradebook.
That email was the crack in my resolve about homework grading. For years, I had dutifully assigned practice work and counted it as a percentage of the final grade. I told myself this was accountability. I told myself homework was the place where kids could practice without a teacher hovering over them, and that the grade was just a way to honor the effort. Really, I was using grades to force kids to work at home.
The moment I knew something was off happened a few weeks earlier, with a student I’ll call Marcus. I’d noticed his answers on a set of algebra problems matched his seatmate’s perfectly, down to the same odd mistake on question four. When I asked him about it, he just shrugged and said, “Well, is the point to learn it or to turn it in?”
He wasn’t being disrespectful. He was naming the obvious. If an assignment is worth points, kids quickly figure out the most efficient way to get those points. Copying a friend is efficient. Copying a website is efficient. Leaving the really hard problem blank because you don’t want to get it wrong is also efficient. None of those behaviors help them learn. But I had built a system that rewarded them.
So I didn’t stop assigning homework. I stopped grading it.
I told the kids: “I’m going to read every problem. I’m going to leave you comments. But you won’t lose points for making mistakes.” At the top of each sheet I printed a small feedback box with three options: “Got it,” “Not quite,” and “Need help.” I circled one. On the bottom, I wrote one short sentence: “You inverted the sign on 3,” or “You’re using proportional reasoning here—explain how you set up 4.” Sometimes I just wrote, “See me at lunch.”
In the online gradebook, I entered a checkmark. Not a number. A checkmark meant nothing in terms of their GPA. It meant you turned something in and gave it a real try. If you didn’t turn it in, I pulled you aside and asked what was going on. Usually the answer was not “I don’t feel like doing it.” It was “I have basketball until seven, then my mom needs help with my little brother, and I fell asleep.” To that, there’s no grade I could give that would be useful. What was useful was giving that kid time at lunch or during study hall to do the practice in a quieter setting.
That Tuesday night, I replied to Dana. I told her: “I’m not grading tonight’s worksheet. Let her stop and put a note at the bottom saying where she got stuck. I’ll read it in the morning. I need to know which part got her, not whether she produced a perfect page.”
Dana wrote back a few minutes later: “Okay. She just went to bed. Thank you.”
The next morning, I read that worksheet. She had stopped at fraction division. Her note said, “I don’t understand why you flip the second number.” That was the clearest piece of information I had gotten from her in weeks. I didn’t need a grade to see it. I needed her to feel safe enough to tell me she was lost.
The idea that homework should be graded is so baked into our expectations that it took me a while to see the damage. A graded worksheet asks a child two questions at once: “Can you do this?” and “Will this affect my average?” Those two questions work against each other. When the stakes are high, kids play it safe. They skip the problem they aren’t sure about. They erase the struggle and copy a neat answer from a friend. They learn not to make visible mistakes—which is exactly the opposite of what practice is supposed to do.
Once I stopped grading homework, I also stopped lying to myself about what that grade had been measuring all along. A homework score doesn’t really measure skill. It measures whether a child has a quiet table, an available adult, and enough after-school energy to complete tasks efficiently. Some kids have all that. I have had kids who didn’t. They had younger siblings screaming in the background, parents working night shifts, house responsibilities. When they turned in a crumpled, half-done page, my gradebook wasn’t measuring their math ability. It was measuring the noise level in their kitchen.
I know not everyone can just stop grading homework. School policies might require a certain number of grades per marking period. Parents often expect to see a score for every assignment. I get it. But you can make a small shift without blowing up the system.
Instead of grading every problem for correctness, count submission and good-faith attempt. A kid gets the point for having honest work there, even if half of it is wrong. Then use tests and in-class work to determine the actual skill grade. You already have the assignment—you’re just changing what you do with it.
Or try writing feedback on only three questions per page, not every single one. Tell students: “I’m not marking this red. I’m telling you what to fix. If you want to know whether 7 is right, check the answer key and ask me tomorrow.” That keeps practice practice, not performance.
If your child’s teacher does grade homework and you’re uncomfortable with it, you can ask one simple question without being confrontational: “Do mistakes lower the grade?” If the answer is yes, you can ask whether your child could instead complete ten problems carefully and get feedback on those. Suggest the teacher allow your child to write a question at the bottom of the page instead of an answer when stuck. Most teachers will hear you out. Some will even say thank you.
I still have nights when I wonder whether not grading homework lets kids off the hook. Some of them definitely skip practice and then struggle on quizzes. I’ve had to resist the urge to say, “See? That’s why you needed to do the problems.” Instead, I just say, “Okay, now we know what to work on.” The homework isn’t magical. But it’s no longer an instrument of punishment. For now, that’s enough.
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