COLUMN: Education should not be about grades
I used to be a student who would not settle for less than an A. Perfect grades were my only goal.
Nowadays that kind of student is my biggest pet peeve.
Getting excellent grades was not satisfying at all. In fact, I was more upset about the grades that fell below my expectations than I was happy about those that surpassed it. I wondered if it was worth all the trouble.
You have to ask questions in order to challenge assumptions and the main question is what is the point of grades?
Teachers will say that grades are meant to gauge learning. Employers will say they measure work ethic. Parents might say that they make sure students are not slacking.
Some people believe grades are a perennial sorting device that tells the smart and dedicated from those who are less so.
Either way it does not feel like grades are doing a good job in any category.
If it is possible for a student to put in half the work of another student in a class and achieve the same grade, something is amiss. This happens more often than people realize.
Most students have gone through their entire educational experience procrastinating on work and simply avoiding truancy. They know that is enough to pass a class and that is exactly the amount of work many of them put in.
So it doesn’t sound to me like grades are a good measure of “work ethic.”
Not only are grades being used as a ruler, they are employed as a method of coercion.
Grades are both the shiny carrot dangling in front of the good students and the whip cracking behind the bad ones.
Classes become about grades, not learning. In fact, genuine critical thinking might get in the way of following instructions in the grading rubric.
A student’s level of learning is also abstract and temporary. This makes grading an obtuse tool since a student might know 90 percent of the subject now and only remember a third of that information in six months.
By the time he or she has found use for the information learned in class, it may be completely forgotten.
Then there is the claim that grades are important because they report academic performance.
What is this “academic performance” we are so desperate to measure? School is not a sport competition and students are not tools to be organized by potential.
Every student has the same potential, just different interests, motivations and incentives. School should be helping each student achieve his or her potential, not categorize them so they feel destined for success or failure.
It is this attitude of performance over experience, grades over learning that creates the stressed out students pulling their hairs over Bs and Cs.
