At some point after a semester ends, I log on to ACES to check my grades. I have to be careful about my timing, though: If I check too soon after the semester ends, then I seem obsessive, but if I wait too long to check, it looks like I'm hiding something.
As a student, I get grades. But I'm not supposed to care about them. It's a delicate balance.
Caring about grades is a cardinal sin, and it's not just students who condemn it. Most professors I have had have explained how terrible and foolish it is that students today are so preoccupied with grades-it's one of the signs of a decaying youth culture, like texting and computer literacy.
The supposed rationale behind this attitude is that a concern for grades detracts from a concern for education. Worrying about the letter you get prevents you from focusing on the subject at hand. Plus, grades encourage competition and vanity instead of respectful discourse and studiousness. Grades are only around so students can pad their resumes and graduate school applications with high GPAs, and so people have evidence to back them up when they brag about how smart they are. Grades serve no educational function, and are merely a bureaucratic interference with the noble pursuit of knowledge. Grades are to education what TRL was to music. And even MTV eventually canceled TRL.
The problem with this kind of anti-grading mentality, however, is that it exacerbates the problems associated with grades. Students and professors both resent grades because they do not see the connection between them and education, but the fact is that there is no education without evaluation. This isn't tee ball; we don't all try our hardest and then go get ice cream. The final score matters, and grades are supposed to represent that final score.
Too often, however, that final score doesn't say anything about what happened in the game. Professors are often so dismissive of grades that they simply relegate the task to TAs, put it off until the last week of the semester or do not provide any substantive justification or explanation of a grade. Asking professors about grades comes off as crass and immature. As a result, the grades they end up giving out seem strange and arbitrary. The end result of this is that grades become more and more like an administrative imposition and less and less like valuable feedback.
Without any real educational import, grades, especially in humanities courses, become all too easy to inflate. Because students are so often told how grades don't matter, they start to get personally offended by any grade less than an A: "If it doesn't mean anything, why not let me get a 4.0? It will at least make my parents happy."
And why shouldn't they be upset? If professors rail against the evils of grades, and then treat them as an afterthought (or, more often, the afterthought of their TAs), then it is inevitable that these grades will not be taken seriously. Students end up arguing over partial credit on every test question, writing formulaic papers that they think their graders will like, "forgetting" to attach a document to an e-mail to avoid late penalties, faking accidents for a few extra days to study and so many other tricks designed to artificially inflate their grades. The end result is that about 25 percent of a graduating class will average above an A-, according to the University Registrar, which states that about a quarter of each graduating class will receive Latin Honors.
In the end, grades do end up interfering with education, but only because they are treated as a completely separate phenomenon. If grades are just bureaucratic necessities that mean nothing to students or professors, then we might as well ditch them completely. If they are here to stay, however, then they should serve some purpose. They should provide valuable feedback to a student. Asking a professor to justify a grade shouldn't be seen as a sign of pettiness or skewed priorities, but of an interest in improvement. Grades shouldn't just be letters on a page or numbers in your GPA, they should tell you something about what you've learned. They shouldn't be pawned off on unfamiliar TAs or doled out at the end of the semester, they should be part of an ongoing dialogue between student and professor. They should, in short, be something worth caring about.
John Schneider is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Monday.
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