Nobody Cares About Your Grades

It’s grading season and the desperation is real, again, as usual.

Students I haven’t heard from in months are asking if there is any way they can pass, and others are jockeying for a few extra points that would bump them to the next higher grade.

The students who have disappeared are out of luck. They made bad decisions and it’s not my responsibility to give them extra time to make up missing work. That wouldn’t be fair to the other students.

Had they been in touch when things got rough for them, I’d have worked with them. But if they ignored my inquiries as to how they were and why they hadn’t completed work, their fate is on them.

The students who ask for the bump?

Well, if they are passing the class, I try to work with them because, frankly, I don’t really care about grades.

Your grades are based on the assessments of your learning. If you learned the material presented in classes and you proved that you understood the concepts, you earned good scores and your final grades will be high.

Why do we have tests in classes? Why do students write papers? Why do students create projects and offer presentations?

These are measurements of student learning.

This is an important thing for students to understand. Faculty members don’t spend countless hours meticulously analyzing student projects and grading exams because we are masochists.

We have to do this in order to measure growth and understanding.

Learning the material is the goal. Your grades are the byproducts.

But why do we need even need grades?

Oh, man, this is a loaded question with a gazillion answers.

Why do we need top ten lists of where to find the best pizza in Tokyo? Or the best cheesesteak in Philly?

Well, we don’t.

We are obsessed with rankings, and we are obsessed with competition. We want to be ranked and judged and loved, as exemplified by our influencer-saturated social media world (PS: please like and share this post!).

We rank colleges, programs, classes and professors. I suppose these are all meant to be services that help people make the best possible decisions, right? What school is best for you? What major will most help you in life? What teachers should you take?

Students are generally ranked by their grade point average, with Latin honors given to the students with the highest GPAs at graduation.

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You need to maintain a certain grade level to stay in school, and to eventually graduate. Those grades serve to prove that you satisfied the minimum requirements (they don’t necessarily prove actual learning, though).

Grading, a system which dates back to the late 1700s, is a means of establishing standards of learning. A student who earns a C understands the material at a satisfactory level. A student who earns a B showed above average appreciation of the material and a student who earns an A has performed with exception.

Of course, decades of grade inflation (combined with the increasing cost of college making students feel like they are customers) have made that scale unrealistic. Everyone thinks they deserve the highest possible grade.

Very few do.

But who cares?

When I was a kid, I was encouraged to get good grades because A’s on my report card meant free arcade tokens at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor.

I have no idea what my grades were in high school (rewards for grades dried up in middle school). I only know my college GPA because I had to dig it up when I applied to graduate school.

It was a 2.66.

My priority in college (aside from playing baseball and hanging with my friends) was to learn how to be a good journalist. I spent a lot of time in the darkroom, in the Loyola Greyhound newsroom and working in the media lab on Mac SE computers.

I started freelancing as a writer and photographer when I was a sophomore and I took any assignments at any time. I photographed a lot of lacrosse games, documented the last game at Memorial Stadium and reported on events around Baltimore. I gained a lot of valuable experience early, which propelled me into bigger and better internships every year.

I did not spend a lot of time at the library. I skipped a lot of my non-journalism classes.

But I was getting hands-on experience. I was learning.

Of course, immediately after graduating and starting work in Ft. Lauderdale, I regretted not taking advantage of the educational opportunities at Loyola. I started reading all the books I was supposed to have studied in college.

I went to grad school a few years after completing my undergraduate degree. I’ve pretty much been in college ever since.

I love learning. I’m in another grad program now.

These days, I find myself busting my butt on my homework assignments. It helps that I’m only taking classes in subjects that appeal to me (in higher education leadership and innovation). I care deeply about the subjects and I find ways to make the reading and assignments relevant to my life and work.

Ironically, I find myself obsessing over grades. When I received an A- in my history of US higher education class, I was incensed (even though the teacher accurately criticized my final paper because I focused on an issue in Japan).

The most important thing, however, is that I’m digesting all the material. The grade ultimately doesn’t matter.

In reality, the whole degree doesn’t really matter – for me or anyone else. I mean, certain jobs require certain degrees because they represent a certain ideal. But having those degrees doesn’t guarantee mastery of anything.

What really matters is that you know the right stuff.

If you apply to graduate school, people will look at your transcript and see your grades. You can try to offset poor grades with an explanation, which is what I did.

But if you run off and get a job or start your own business, nobody will ever look at your grades ever again. No one will ever care.

It’s not worth begging for the next higher grade, really (if you do, please state that you’ll do extra work to prove that you learned the material, as I won’t just bump your grade).

Go learn stuff.

Absorb it, process it and show the world that you know it.

And quit worrying about your grades.