Grades Aren't Everything

What were your priorities in school? Were you focused on learning for the sake of learning, or just trying to be able to regurgitate information to get a passing grade? Were you concerned more about knowing information because it was useful in life? Or were you concerned with your GPA so you could get into the college you wanted? I know I was more concerned in passing my classes instead of learning. I wanted to get into Luther, and I knew that my GPA would influence not only the chance of getting accepted but also the chance for scholarships. I never really though about the skills and abilities I was being taught, I was just so focused on getting into Luther.

In high school everything that I did involved a grade. Participate in class, earn points. Present a PowerPoint Slideshow about a Supreme Court Justice, earn points. Take a test about certain cabinets and leadership positions in the government, earn points. We are teaching students that school is just about getting points that give us a letter grade indicating our performance. Students complete homework because their grade depends on it and they don't take the time to analyze what or how the homework impacts their life. We aren't teaching skills, we are teaching labor.

In college so much more attention is put towards how daily life is impacted by what we are learning. Take Physics for example. There are properties of individual parts of particles that act differently when viewed on a microscopic scale than when they are viewed at the total particle level. If we can understand how ideas like this can work like this then we can figure out why certain things happen in life that we didn't understand before. This discovery is learning.

Because this is drastically different from what we do in elementary, middle, and high schools, students have to change their thought process and sometimes work ethic to match what a college expects. Sure, college is harder than high school. But this difference in application of knowledge is what can make a "perfectly capable high school student" fail and drop out of college.

Another thing to consider is that grades are not standardized. To reach an A in a math class may take more rigorous work to complete daily assignments and weekly tests with enough problems answered correctly, while in a psychology class a student might just need to conduct a few surveys and state their results to receive an A. Obviously the math students are working harder but receiving the same grade as psychology students that aren't working as hard.

Hard work is another problem with grades. How do you tell if someone needs to work hard to complete an assignment. I was strong in math, so I could complete a math assignment in ten minutes and receive an A while other students would work for hours and only receive a C. Is that something that should just be accepted, or do we need to change how we evaluate learning? Do we even need to evaluate learning?

I believe teachers believe to strongly in evaluating the amount a student has learned by ways of homework and tests. Think about it. If a student is just able to take a certain amount of information and regurgitate it back on homework or a test and forget about it because the class has moved on from that, did they actually learn anything? No. They are just working hard enough to get the grade they want and be as lazy as possible. We promote this more as we increase the amount of homework and testing done in class.

What we need to do is look back to the way the ancient Greeks taught. A scholar would talk about a subject, and if it was a debatable subject present different arguments for different sides, and the students would ask questions and take notes. There were no tests, no homework, just an open forum. The students learned, those students in turn taught the next generation of students, and civilization progressed forward. If it worked back then, who says that it cant work now? Cancel your homework assignments and postpone your tests indefinitely. Give interactive lectures and demonstrations, and let the students interact or create their own demo about the next subject you teach. They will be more interested and will actually learn something and remember it for years to come.