How Much Do Grades Really Matter? By: Ruby Mitchell

     How Much Do Grades Really Matter? By: Ruby Mitchell

A majority of high school students, especially at a school like Uni, strive to have good grades and tend to base their self worth on their grades. But are these obsessions with good grades warranted? Do good grades always reliably reflect how smart someone is? Recently, there has been a lot of pushback against the traditional grading system, with many schools across America diverging from the traditional system into newer, more lenient and student-specific ways of assessing students' performances. Many schools have begun using standard based grading, arguing that it more effectively communicates how a student is performing in class. According to The Atlantic: “Currently, 45 states have adopted the Common Core State Standards”. This new grading standard comes as a direct effect of the pushback on the vagueness of the letter-based grading scale.

A common argument for why we should keep the traditional grading system is that it's easy and recognizable. You can look at your grade and accurately assess how well you understand the class. If you get an A, you’re doing great, B is good, C is mediocre, D is bad, and F is failing. It’s also much easier for classes like math, where the answers are very black and white, right and wrong, with little room for small mistakes or half credit. The issue with the standard grading system is that it can’t give a complete image of how smart someone is or how good/bad they’re doing in the class. If someone takes a test and gets an F, then learns from their mistakes and re-teaches it to themself, they might know all of the information, but they would still be failing the class. Grades also depend heavily on the teacher. Especially in classes like English, one teacher may give an A on an essay where another would give a C, depending on how they categorize a “good” piece of writing. 

I think that grading systems are not the best way to assess a student’s performance in a class, but I understand why people want it to stay. It would be very hard to change the entire grading system, and if one school changes it and another doesn’t, the playing field becomes unfair, with one school being “easier” or more lenient than another. While the grading system can’t change overnight, one important thing can: a student’s outlook on grades. In reality, grades do not accurately assess someone’s intelligence. Depending on the classes, it’s actually very easy to get straight A’s. In a lot of classes, the only thing you have to do to get an A is complete all the work and do it right. You could write a very bad essay that doesn’t go very in depth about the topic and has little to no nuance, and still get an A on the essay because you checked all of the boxes on the rubric. Was the essay necessarily a good piece of writing? No, you just get a good grade because you did everything you’re supposed to. In classes like math and science, good grades can be guaranteed by memorization alone. You don't have to fully understand a topic, but if you can recite what the teacher said in class, you can get an A. Using the same logic, a grade below an A doesn't necessarily mean that you are struggling or bad at a certain subject. You can get bad grades simply for not understanding a question on a test or not fulfilling all of the standards for a certain essay. That doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer, it just means that you didn’t do exactly what your teacher wanted you to do. Standard letter grades are way too vague to accurately assess a student’s abilities in that subject, much less the student's overall intelligence, but sadly, grades have become a means of competition among students and a way for students to judge and critique themselves. 

It’s hard not to stress about grades, I know that. All I’m trying to say is that good grades do not equate to intelligence, and bad grades don’t equate to stupidity. One bad grade on a test won’t make or break your chance to get into your dream college, and intelligence, like many other things, is subjective. One person might categorize intelligence as being able to do high level math, while another might relate it to being able to create art or music. In a perfect world, the grading system would be more lenient and would be more focused on individual evaluations of students rather than vague letter grades, but in the meantime, try to focus less on the grades you get, cause they really don’t matter that much.

Sources:

https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/effects-of-grading-system-on-students/ 

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/letter-grades-deserve-an-f/284372/