Grades

Paraphrasing Edwin Starr’s famous song with what many students are thinking now that school has resumed, “Grades (Oomph) What are they good for? Absolutely nothing (Good God y’all)”

When a teacher introduces a new topic, the first question raised by students is, “Will this be on the test?” If not, for 90% of the class, the teacher may as well be speaking Klingon for all the attention paid.

In the eyes of students and especially their parents, high grades are the key to social and economic advantage. Your high school GPA gets you into Harvard. Your Harvard degree gets you a good job and a vacation home in the Hamptons. If you’re really lucky, like Harvard grad Jared Kushner, it also gets you $2 billion from the Saudis for your real estate business.

Of course, some claim that the emphasis on grades, rather than on learning, undermines the inherent value of education. “Education teaches you how to think not what to think.” Some progressive colleges abandoned grading altogether. Nearly all have some pass/fail courses. Professors love it. Lafayette required that grades be posted within 48 hours of the Final Exam. Imagine grading two hundred Chemistry 101 Finals at warp speed. Lafayette had no graduate Teaching Assistants to foist this task on.

Others claim that grades are the only way to incentivize students. “Do I party tonight and still do well enough to barely pass that Calculus Final or do I study tonight and get an “A”?”

Grades or no grades, which is better? What if the answer is somewhere in between? Students will do the minimum to achieve their personal academic goal. In nearly every case, that goal is to wear a silly hat and a suffocatingly hot robe while listening to incredibly boring graduation speeches. If graduation depends solely on obtaining a certain minimum GPA, many graduates can skip by without really learning anything. Most doctoral programs do it right. Regardless of GPA, PhD candidates must defend their thesis and demonstrate a mastery of their subject matter in an oral exam. Fail to impress the faculty and it’s another year of research or T.A.ing.

“Grades (Oomph) What are they good for?” There’s no easy answer.

By Ed Dufton