Throughout our lives, the importance of having good grades has been drilled into our brains almost more so than the actual information we should be learning. Grading on an A to F (or E) scale is the way our teachers and professors are able to assess our learning. But at what point did the product become more important than the process? Additionally, having the system set up in this manner promotes “cramming” for exams — retaining material in short-term memory, which leads to inevitably losing nearly all of the information that was supposed to be learned in our time not only at college, but throughout our entire educational career.
As a college student and future teacher I have been wondering how much grades matter and where the balance between grades and the whole person lies. Does our GPA define our college experience and our lives for four (or more) years?
If our time at college is only defined by our grades, then good grades must indicate going to class, studying and not much else. Boring! Poor grades would say the opposite: too much partying, playing and fun. What about everything else — the clubs we joined, the volunteer work we participated in and the friends that we made? It seems as though in some cases the whole person is ignored and just the numbers (which are easier to rank) are looked at. To use GPA as a ruler to gauge the ability of students obviously falls short.
Sadly, college students are not the only people who measure their achievement by their grades. Students in high school need good grades to get into the college of their choice and are often judged by ACT or SAT scores. Younger students do not have to worry too much about getting into the middle school or high school of their choice, but certainly being graded does effect them.
As a second-grade student teacher, I am partially responsible for the education of 26 second-grade students. They need to learn the state core curriculum and all the information on the standardized tests they will be taking at the end of the year, but I want my students to learn more than that. I want my students to come out of my class better people and better citizens — aware of what their strengths are and knowing how to learn, how to focus, how to make friends and hopefully, the curriculum I was responsible to teach them. However, their only measure of success is the letter grade I assign to them based on their knowledge of the curriculum and, perhaps increasingly more important, how well they fill in the circles on their end-of-level test.
In just their first term in second grade I have seen so much progress in my second graders, but most of it cannot be represented by a letter grade. I will be able to express their amazing progress at parent-teacher conferences, but I feel like that is not enough. I wish there was another way for students to be graded that showed the whole person, not just the academic part of the student.
What we need to focus on as an academic community is the actual act of learning, the long-term retention of information and the person as a whole. Our problem is not the availability of the information we teach, it is how the assessment system is organized.
To shift the standard thinking away from “I must get an A” to “I must learn this material” would in itself do more to better our education than any other alternative. I do not claim to have the answers to this problem (I wish I knew where to start), but I can plainly see that flaws do exist. If we could make an effort to focus on the student’s success as a whole — not just their mastery of the curriculum and their ability to correctly fill in bubbles on standardized tests — we could make the education system better for students and in turn, our society.
