assigning grades

I finished assigning grades. I was nice. I would love to teach classes without grades; I think that grading only interferes with the educational channel between students and teachers. The only educational advantages (forget institutional advantages) of grading that I can see are the following:

(1) Graded assignments are much more likely to be taken seriously and completed. This consideration is paternalistic but it may have some force in the real world. (2) Graded assignments give the students low-bandwidth but high-impact feedback on their knowledge and gaps in that knowledge. This consideration is also paternalistic, since verbal analysis of student performance contains far more information, but it is true in my experience that a low grade (on, say, a mid-term) is much more likely to inspire hard work than a verbal suggestion.

That said, grading makes my relationship with the students somewhat adversarial. It also discourages students (especially those with performance-based financial support) from taking risks with their course selection. This point, maybe the most important, is the one that clearly shows grading to be incompatible with the (important) mission of the University.