<p>Moving beyond traditional assessment, grades, and grading requires a reorientation to teaching-and-learning that involves a shift in ethos, rather than merely the adoption/adaption of a different pedagogical strategy. Pedagogues committed to critical, feminist, democratic, anti-racist, or abolitionist approaches may find the gradeless classroom (or university) a direct extension of their values and praxis. Interrogating the inherent power disparities imbued in grades and grading, alternative assessment—and “ungrading” in particular—is often leveraged to increase equity, student agency, and inclusivity. What transpires, however, when rejecting the tyranny of grades reinscribes hegemonic ideologies of, for example, whiteness, cisheteropatriarchy, or neoliberalism? This article explores two related themes as contributions to the conceptual and empirical literatures on ungrading. First, I position alternative assessment broadly and ungrading specifically in critical, feminist, engaged, and abolitionist pedagogies. Second, situating ungrading in the scholarship of teaching and learning about alternative assessment, I provide a reflexive intervention critiquing how these approaches may collude with and/or co-exist with the very systems of oppression they aim to—in part—subvert.</p>