Grades- it’s what a lot of students worry about. We worry about our grades because we want to get hired by future employers, maintain scholarships and just feel better about ourselves overall. But what if we stopped worrying about grades and focused more on what is actually being taught?
The one thing I focus the most on in school is what my grades are. I’m a perfectionist and I always want to make A’s and B’s on my tests. Sometimes, this makes me lose focus of what really matters- what I am actually learning. I think more about how I can get those points to keep an A than what is being taught by my professor.
But where did the grading system come from? According to The Graide Network, grades were not a thing until the 1940s. Before then, what a person learned was based on a descriptive communication between the student and the teacher. That made it difficult for different institutions to communicate their scores to each other. The grading system was developed to make communication between institutions easier.
Using this grading system may have made communication easier for institutions, but in reality, it’s had a negative effect on students. The Graide Network said that institutions use a mixture of both evaluative grading, which would be the grade you get on tests or homework, and descriptive grading, which is the professor verbally explaining to you what you did wrong.
We’ve become so focused on evaluative grading that we’ve lost the importance of descriptive grading. But without descriptive grading, you’ll never fully understand what you are doing wrong.
Why should you care about learning if you have good grades? Because if you aren’t learning, you won’t like what you are doing. It’s important to understand your major and grasp concepts even when they are tough.
If you love what you are doing, you’ll learn the material. Otherwise, you might want to reconsider your major. Be totally in wraps with what you are doing and make sure that you love learning it. Focus more on what you are learning and less on grades because this will make your college experience better than you could have imagined.