Should Grades Really Matter?

Grades. They’re a big part of our education system; in fact, our system relies on them. However, they are deeply flawed. And for something so flawed, they matter so much to us.

By: Milo Rachal

Should grades still matter?

Before we get into the grades of 2025, we need to know how we got here. 

Letter grades as we know them (A, B, C, D, F) are relatively new in education, not being widely used until the 1940s. Prior to the late 1700s, feedback and performance systems in the U.S. education were individualistic or more idiosyncratic. 

But grades were standardized for a reason. Letter grades are used across many schools so that one grade would mean the same for every student who had it. 

This may have been well and good when it was first implemented, making life much easier for teachers and students. 

As the years have gone by, schools have slowly changed from places to further knowledge and grow in your understanding of life to competitions and needing to be the best or at the top of your class. 

Grades make learning a competition between students. If you have the highest grade in the class, you’re the best. That is the mentality in classrooms. Competitiveness over collaboration. 

Grades aren’t and never will be fair. They change the environment of schools to getting grades over gaining knowledge. Here’s the truth: just because you have a good grade in a class doesn’t mean you actually learned anything.

I’m sure the majority of students, even here at Redwood, have had the experience of studying super hard for a test, taking it, and immediately forgetting all the information once you leave the classroom. Meaning you didn’t really learn anything; you were just ingesting the information to hopefully get a good grade.

This has three predictable effects on students: They’re less interested in learning, they prefer to do simpler or easier tasks, and they develop shallow thinking. 

Alfie Kohn, an American author and lecturer known for his talks about human behavior, education, and parenting, said, “They [students] tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in learning itself.”

Pros and Cons of grades for easier comparison:

Negative effects of grades:

1. Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in learning itself
2. Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenging tasks
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking
4. Grades aren’t valid, reliable, or objective
5. Distorts the curriculum
6. Wastes a lot of time that could be spent on learning
7. Encourages cheating
8. Grades spoil teachers’ relationships with students and students’ relationships with each other

Positive effects of grades:

1. Standardization and universally recognized by at least every state in the country
2. Easy to understand for students, parents, teachers, and admissions committees
3. Comparisons (ex: makes college admissions assess who’s ready for college)

(List from uopeople.edu)

With this information that schools are aware of, they’ve tried to implement the idea of a Growth Mindset in their students to help them better cope with this. The growth mindset is something that every student is familiar with at this point.

A growth mindset is described as a mindset where people believe that they can get better at something by dedicating time, effort and energy (definition taken from TopHat.com). 

However, this kind of mindset is almost impossible to incorporate into students’ lives because of the grading system. Students instead believe that they can only get better at something academically by scoring well, not challenging themselves, only doing what they know how to do, and not taking risks. 

Laura Gibbs, an online teacher from the University of Oklahoma, did her study by giving her students individual feedback, having her students chart their progress for the ultimate grade they want, then she either passes them if they’re on the right track or doesn’t pass them based on their progress so far. 

Her students had a few things to say about this: “I loved being able to write what I wanted and not be graded subjectively. It made it easy for me to be creative!” 

“There was an emphasis on learning the course material rather than worrying about grades.”

And, “It was amazing and I think I learned more in this course than I have in any other in a long time.”

To be fair to our teachers here at Redwood and other high schools, Laura Gibbs had the freedom to do this because she works at a university. The majority of teachers who have tried implementing something like this for grades work in colleges or universities.

If any change is going to happen to grades in high schools, it’s going to take a while.

Now, considering the stress and unhealthy competition that stems from grades, should they matter?

In my honest opinion, no, absolutely not. I’ve seen grades impact many of my friends extremely negatively. Staying up late to study, the fear of how their parents will react to their grades, seeing grades as a way to be better than everyone else in at least one thing to feel good about themselves… It’s not good.

But this is not about me. Do you believe that grades should still matter so much?

(Information throughout the story can be found in the book: Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) by, Susan Blum, and Alfie Kohn)

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