“What?!! An 82%?” You cry in disbelief as the number on the last page of your exam flashes before you sinfully. Next, self-compassion sets in, and you ask yourself: “Why am I obsessed over grades?”
Introduced in the 1940s, letter grades universalized the grading system between schools and set a standard of evaluation for college admissions. Grades are a unit of measurement, but unlike miles, milliliters, or decibels, they are not a very reliable unit.
Often it is not the grades in themselves that worry us, but the role of our GPAs in college admissions that do so. The problem rises when colleges set GPA benchmarks to slim down their overwhelming application count, as happened this year when test-optional policies lifted the dam. Using GPAs to filter applicants before looking at other factors—such as personal qualities and extracurriculars—reduces a student’s entire profile to a single number. Their use has made it hard for students to learn for the sake of learning. We are now conditioned to doing everything for grades.
Grades also restrain students from taking courses that are intriguing but rigorous, out of fear of blemishing their transcripts. The system teaches us to throw a fit at the letter C when, really, we need to be taught not to give up during these times. Some students do the opposite, taking higher-level courses that they’re not interested in just to prove their academic abilities to colleges. The only thing that matters is the recipe for getting the grade they want.
So, if these capricious letters do not measure our acquired knowledge, what is their value? Are A’s simply golden tickets to Ivy League schools? How, then, do colleges assess our academic aptitude if our only desire is to get good grades?
Education would be better through an activity-focused approach, where we don’t even talk about grades that often, except to become better at what we’re doing. Bucknell University developed a system called the GPA of Medians (GPAM), which calculates the median GPA in the class and compares it against the individual’s actual GPA. The addition of the GPAMs gives us the context of a certain GPA, hence portrays a more accurate picture of students’ academic performance. A student with a 3.6 GPA against a 2.8 GPAM is excelling academically, whereas a student with a 3.8 GPA against a 3.9 GPAM may just be a mediocre student amid a grade-inflated class.
When grades do not help us become better learners and instead drag us into a risk-averse mindset, they become repugnant. Grades are an inevitable component in the education system; the question is, whether they play too much of a role in defining who we are.
Works cited:Lee, Christine. “What Is the History of Grading?” Turnitin. 14 Oct. 2020.Nierenberg, Amelia, and Kate Taylor. “A College Admissions Rat Race.” The New York Times. 25 Feb. 2021.Solomon, Tom, and Adam Piggott. “GPAs don’t really show what students learned. Here’s why.” The Washington Post. 15 June 2018.
About the Author 作者简介
Name: Cynthia Zhang
Grade: 10
School: Northfield Mount Hermon
姓名：张澜馨
年级：10
学校：北野山高中
Hailing from Beijing, Cynthia is a sophomore at Northfield Mount Hermon, a boarding school in Massachusetts. She explores the surrounding world through an artistic lens of creative writing. Outside of writing, Cynthia enjoys playing the works of Debussy and Liszt, debating, and mentoring young students English and piano.
Cynthia来自北京，是马萨诸塞州一所寄宿学校——北野山高中的高二学生。她通过创意写作的艺术视角探索周围的世界。除了写作，她喜欢演奏德彪西和李斯特的作品、辩论、以及指导年龄较小的学生英语和钢琴。
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