My co-founder Mike has never forgotten his kindergarten report card. He was five; it was 1960. The teacher sent home an envelope, and inside were the marks — not letters yet, just an S or a U, satisfactory or unsatisfactory, for the small business of being a child.

I bring worthwhile things to class. U. (His mom started letting him take things to school.)
Something about nap time. U. (“Just try harder.”)
I sing songs in tune. U.

That third one crushed him. He was five, and a grown-up had made it official: he sang wrong. From that day on, he only pretended to sing — in class, in church, at birthday parties. Pretend to sing. Pretend to fit in. He’ll tell you, sixty-some years later, that he’s never forgotten what that third U did to that little kid.

Here’s the part that matters: that memory was sitting right there when Mike, a teacher himself by then, sat down to design how his students would be assessed. He built something deliberately unlike the thing that had marked him. He’ll say it plainly — the third U was “vital in the long run,” because it’s the reason his rubric doesn’t do to kids what that report card did to him.

I came at the same idea from the opposite direction — later, and louder.

I’d taught photography for most of my career up to that point when I got handed a course I’d never taught: Digital Art. I did everything right on paper — units, a grading policy, the works. First grading period, two-thirds of my third-year art students were failing. Not because they couldn’t do art — because my gradebook was measuring the wrong things, and it was crushing them the way Mike’s U crushed him.

So I did the only thing that made sense once I admitted the problem was mine: I gave everyone an A and deleted the gradebook. Then I asked them what they actually wanted to make. They made music videos, animated films, photo essays. By spring their portfolios were the best work I’d ever gotten from a class — good enough that twenty-eight of them signed up for the AP Studio Art portfolio exam, in a course that wasn’t even AP. All twenty-eight passed.

I didn’t lower the bar by removing grades. I got out of the way of students clearing it.

There’s a name for this now — ungrading — and a growing number of teachers trying it. It isn’t “no standards” or “everyone gets a trophy,” which is the first thing people assume. It’s the recognition that traditional grades quietly work against the very thing they’re supposed to measure. A letter collapses a hundred kinds of progress into one symbol, and once that symbol is the point, students optimize for the symbol: they play it safe, they stop taking the risks learning requires, and — like a five-year-old who decides never to sing again — they learn to protect themselves from the mark instead of chasing the work.

The learning scientist Barry Fishman makes this case better than I can: school is a badly designed game, and grades are a big part of why. It’s the same instinct behind why I distrust bolt-on gamification — decorating a broken system with points and badges doesn’t fix it. Ungrading doesn’t throw out assessment; it moves it back where it belongs: into the work itself. Progress you can see. Feedback in the moment. Real evidence — a portfolio, a project, a thing you made — instead of a number that tells you almost nothing.

That’s the assessment philosophy Gameful is built on, and it’s no accident both of us landed there through a grade that hurt. Gameful doesn’t hand you a gradebook that ranks kids against each other. It gives students a visible sense of where they are and what’s next — progress and mastery they can feel — and it makes their real work the evidence. You can still generate grades if your school requires them; most of us have to. But the daily experience your students live in isn’t “what’s my grade?” It’s “how do I get better at this, and what do I want to make next?”

If you’ve been curious about ungrading but wary of the leap — how do you even run a class without the gradebook doing the driving? — that’s a lot of what Gameful is for: the structure to hold up a class built on mastery and choice instead of the threat of a bad mark. You can see how teachers have set that up in the Codex, or start on the Learn page. And if you want more of Mike’s stories and the thinking underneath Gameful, that all lives over on Meanderings.

Mike still won’t touch a karaoke machine. Sixty-some years later, one unsatisfactory mark still has that much say over one grown man. That’s the quiet power of a grade — and the reason both of us spent our careers building something gentler, and honestly more truthful. If a single U can convince a kid he can’t sing, imagine what a classroom built the other way could convince him he can do.

— Mick McMurray, founder of Gameful (still teaching)