Rule by the Letter
It’s no secret that students desire good grades. Spend any amount of time talking to a student and they’ll tell you how concerned they are about their grades. Unfortunately however it seems as though this concern over grades might be growing to unhealthy proportions—possibly at the expense of other elements of one’s education.
Grades are sort of the currency of the education system. They are the units of exchange that delineate intellectual and experiential worth amongst the student community. Much like money, grades have no intrinsic value. Grades are meant to quantify accomplishments that are otherwise too abstract or obscure to conveniently classify and exchange with others. This is so primarily because it is much easier to give someone a letter or a number in order to represent what they “know” rather than actually going through the trouble of explaining what they “know” directly. As useful as this convenience may be, however, it still comes with some risks.
One risk is the fact that grades are not necessarily accurate. The degree to which grades are used as a “shortcut” for the marketing of academic achievements is the degree to which the grading system jeopardizes its accuracy. In other words, the more one tries to simplify something inherently complex, the more the simplification distorts the original. Clearly, 15 weeks worth of studying and working cannot be condensed down into a single variable reliably. Doing so must necessarily risk distorting a student’s genuine intellectual or academic standing.
That grades are potentially inaccurate is not terribly alarming. What is alarming though is how such inaccuracies can corrupt the relationship between students and their learning. If grades do not necessarily reflect one’s true intellectual ability then there is less reason for a student to associate grades with learning. The most unfortunate consequence of this is that students are predisposed to invert their perception of the relationship of grades to learning. Instead of perceiving knowledge as the primary goal of their education (where grades simply compliment the knowledge gained), students begin to perceive the grade as the primary goal of their education (where learning is pursued only insofar as it is perceived to benefit the grade). In other words, the grade becomes the reason for learning instead of learning being the reason for the grade.
This problem is further augmented by the importance the academic system itself places on grades. As every student knows, if he or she wants to advance within the academic and employment institutions of our society it is a virtual necessity that he or she maintain a high GPA. This demand for grades by seemingly important institutions suggests to students that it is the students grades that are most important—not what they actually know.
In addition to this, most instructors amplify a concern for grades within their students’ eyes by providing detailed breakdowns of their particular grading system. The information that is supposedly the impetus for the course is meticulously dissected into fragments where each fragment is assigned some point value or percentage that the student is to interpret as the amount the piece of information is “worth.” Because such a rigid and systematized approach to grading reduces the intrinsic value of learning to nothing more than a means to the acquisition of points, it is no surprise that students misperceive that grades are the most important element of their education.
If the goal of academia is to “generate, disseminate and apply knowledge,” as the UW Parkside Mission statement suggests for example, then the over-emphasis upon grades evident in the academic system today needs to be carefully reexamined.