Have you ever aced a particularly difficult test, or written an essay you’re extremely proud of? You may have looked back on your work, thinking it must surely be A+ worthy, that you would get that 100 for sure, only to find that was disappointingly not the case. You may have encountered that one teacher particularly fond of unceremoniously reminding students that they don’t give out 100s, because nothing is perfect. The truth is the entirety of our work can never be perfect, it will always be littered with defects and flaws we’ll only recognize in hindsight.
You may have heard the phrase “to make mistakes is human,” and it continues to ring true. When the impossible standard of perfection is assigned a number, a grade that students consistently work for, it leads to disheartenment and disinterest in learning. The goal of a teaching institution should not be to instill the pursuit of perfection in scholars, but rather improvement. Students should be invited and encouraged to seek new knowledge, ask questions, and understand the lessons being taught in their classroom, but oftentimes these values are neglected in favor of numbers on a report card. When educational systems set standards where achieving a certain numerical value is equivalent to an extraordinary feat, they narrow a student’s vision and distort their aim from genuinely learning to receiving a higher number on their assignment.
Grades by no means define a person, as humans themselves are not quantifiable. Grades are simply a reflection of a student’s performance on specific criteria. An individual’s performance on these criteria heavily depends on the way they are taught this information. Not everyone learns the same way, and although education systems cannot realistically personalize education from student to student, teachers can offer various different ways to attain information. For example, a lecture may appeal to students who learn auditorily but not to visual learners, so having an accompanying slideshow with visuals to present information would more clearly communicate the lesson to those students. A student’s personal inability to fit expectations of what kind of student they should be and how they’re “supposed to learn” can leave them feeling incompetent. In reality, they’re not any less intelligent than their peers, but simply receive information in a different manner.
Oftentimes, grades do not define anyone’s intelligence, but rather the extent to which they can memorize and regurgitate information. Rote memorization is the lowest form of learning, and this is the very one we observe most commonly in our school system. In and of itself, the system does not teach students the critical thinking skills and ability to form deeper connections that they will need to utilize throughout their lives. So, determining one’s intelligence, self-esteem, or sense of self over this crude test of skill is more harmful and limiting than it is informative. A more effective grading technique would be one that quantifies a student’s abilities to make deeper connections, to think outside the box, and to be creative. These are things that reflect human nature; humans intrinsically know and create. We’re not made to be perfect; we’re made to perpetually learn, change, and grow. We are not a fixed number on a piece of paper; we are books overflowing with chapters, and even more blank pages. We’re splattered with ink and smudged with the touch of many a hand. Our stories are just being written and for every page we fill, another remains blank.
