Beyond Grades: Rethinking Assessment Practices in Professional Physical Therapist Education

Traditional ranking-based grades may not fully capture the reflective and metacognitive processes essential for adaptive learning in professional physical therapist development. They may reinforce power hierarchies, disproportionately affecting learners from historically marginalized backgrounds. Physical therapist educators should consider ungraded assessment practices that emphasize equity and focus on assessment for learning, promoting engagement, reflection, and self-regulated learning. This quality improvement (QI) project explored the use of an ungraded approach in a professional graduate-level physical therapy course.

The Plan-Do-Study-Act method guided this QI project, which involved converting a first-year Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) course to use an ungraded approach. Data from multiple sources were thematically and descriptively summarized.

Learners' experience with and perceptions of the ungraded approach were overwhelmingly positive, appearing to foster learner growth in various adaptive learning skills, promote intrinsically motivated and self-regulated learning, and support learner well-being and personal growth. The ungraded approach enabled an effective evaluation of student learning and content mastery, as course expectations and learning objectives were met. Final course grades submitted included 43 A's, 18 A-'s, 3 B+'s, and 5 B's, with no students failing.

Given the positive feedback from both learners and the educator, as well as the ongoing nature of QI work, the ungraded approach will be continued in future iterations of the course. Future efforts will focus on gathering more formal outcomes, further evaluating the feasibility of the ungrading approach in DPT education, and investigating its use to develop Master Adaptive Learner skills.