As another disappointing semester of virtual learning draws to a close, students are all experiencing a familiar sensation: racing to increase the grades that an envelope will soon deliver to our home addresses. Although the anxiety-inducing GPA system is a reassuring normalcy during this chaotic quarantine, it does seem strange that in a year so socially and academically mercurial, the same grading operation would continue with hardly any resistance or revisions. Depending on where your GPAs are, grading during distanced school has been a miracle for some students and an affliction for others, but either way, I think we are all startled that a singular irregular fraction is, somehow, summarizing the last five months of zoom we have survived. Our shock, though, is immature: in American schools, numerical grades are so long-established that it would be delusional to imagine another approach, even in an international health emergency. So delusional, in fact, that when LAUSD schools were warned last semester that no final grades could be worse than they were during in-person learning, grades were practically abolished altogether and assignments, to the glee of many of my classmates, were optional.
Grades are a nightmare even in a pre-quarantine world, but as you all know, virtual classes have given students and teachers alike a whole new swarm of issues: wi-fi access has decreased asynchronous attendance, cheating on exams is frankly inescapable, and the kid who never reveals their camera is either listening to the lesson, smoking weed in another room, or skydiving, and no one knows which. A kid with missing assignments is either utterly perplexed by the material, sick of glaring at a screen, or babysitting younger siblings rather than doing homework. We are all confused academically, and will remain confused until zoom classes are over. The GPA situation over quarantine is not a new crisis on its own, but, rather, amplifies a longer-lasting theme in American schools: mathematical values do not, in any circumstance, accurately evaluate academic performance.
Grading in American schools suggests that we are all on an equal playing field, that we all have and need similar resources for following our educational aspirations, so if one kid scores above another kid in a geometry class, they are either smarter, harder-working, or both. This apocryphal certainly does not cause college admission anxieties in high schools (GPA was invented way before college acceptance rates became so impossible), but it does escalate our worries. If kids want to show colleges their intelligence, and know that their GPA is the main gauge for that intelligence, they will logically attempt to increase their GPA by enrolling in more AP classes than they can handle, cheating on exams rather than asking for tutoring, losing sleep to memorize algebraic algorithms, and so on. Numerical grades do not motivate kids to learn information, only to fool teachers more convincingly that they have done so. It is no coincidence that as college attendance has soared in America, substance abuse and suicidal ideations among adolescents have also intensified. On average, a percentage grade in a high school class is composed of a few heavily weighted exams and homework participation points: these grades measure how students recapitulate information in isolated situations like exams, rather than how they learn that information, or if they are even awake during the lessons. GPA is its own exclusive statistic, one unaffiliated with intelligence, as much as our families and schools assure us otherwise. A student with a high GPA is a student with a high GPA. Schools are the ones who give that kid medals and scholarships.
U.S. schools are only one symptom of a nation that is addicted to finite mathematical statistics as a meter for brilliance. A shoe company is ranked respective to its revenue, a song gains attention based on its streams, a car is considered high caliber or low caliber depending on its maximum velocity, and so on. In schools, valedictorians are admired as intellectual, hard-working, and deserving of high salaries as grown-ups, whereas kids behind grade level are assumed to remain second-class and ancillary when their graduation is over. In such a fashion, American schools closely imitate American capitalism, positioning kids into lifelong financial classes before they are even old enough to smoke cigarettes.
GPA, and its sheer lack of explanations or asterisks, insinuates that intelligence is a neutral attribute we can measure, graph and average, like blood sugar levels or virus infection rates. GPA, when administered in schools, generates a dangerous attitude among students that the numerical grades appearing in red marker on their assignments demonstrate their intelligence; an attitude that deliberately divides high-achieving and low-achieving kids through social circles and schedules. When middle and high school students are given qualitative remarks or suggestions on our work (compliments in the margins of a persuasive essay, for example), we begin viewing academic performance as a flexible spectrum, one that all students land somewhere along. More than that, we begin appreciating ourselves as individuals whose work is separated from our classmates and deserves separate feedback. Numerical grades, by contrast, are vague and venomous. A kid with an 84%, noticeably, does not learn information the way that a kid with a 52% does. GPA, however, neither differentiates nor attempts to differentiate between these kids and their learning processes, although it would falsely lead you to assume that the 84% has a brighter future than the 52%, because one number is so visibly higher than the other. GPA is a fixed value, one that lacks human opinion yet still somehow moves kids up and down a brutally unforgivable academic hierarchy. A kid with a low GPA is trained to be disappointed with themselves and their work ethic, rather than with the teachers who deemed their work inadequate. Calculators are never wrong.
I believe the main flaw in GPA, above all else, is its laziness. If numerical grades in America are designed to rank kids academically, they do so in a highly inaccurate and reckless manner. A kid who earns a 79% is given the same C that a kid with a 72% is given, meanwhile a kid with an 80% earns more; a volleyball player with a 1.9 GPA is ineligible for games and practices, though someone with a 2.0 GPA qualifies for the season; the valedictorian award goes to the kid with a 4.36, salutatorian for a 4.35. As nonsensical as these examples are, apathetic and clinical grading criteria is a direct ramification of an ill-fated educational system that evaluates kids like machines. Numerical grades, either on smaller assignments or annual GPAs, never have and never will match the complexity of the chemical formulas or novels we are learning in our classes. Giving kids a percentage grade on essays or science labs is, essentially, like giving a gymnastic routine a score: the digits leave no uncertainty over who won, but never show you the magical landings and accidental mistakes that give a routine distinction. A high school class is, in many ways, a dance, and our universally accepted GPA system deprives American students of the attentive and precise criticism that academic growth demands.
At the heart of our grading discussion lies an education that, despite being located in a modern and rapidly evolving nation, has barely improved or worsened over the generations. While America was abolishing racial segregation, filming movies in color, and engineering nuclear bombs, kids continued to learn the same information with the same methods at the same ages. Classrooms, allegedly innovative nurseries for our next political candidates, astronomists, authors, and vascular surgeons, see no reward in deviating from an ancestral grading system that is uncomplicated and relatively unproblematic. We should not be blaming schools for implementing GPA, as we also can not blame musicians in the eighties who sold their albums on CDs. We should be wondering, though, why our institutions have not moved on since.
The flaw in feedback-based grading, and perhaps the reason behind its absence in American schools, is how enervating and time-consuming it is for teachers. If all students started receiving qualitative criticism on their assignments, teachers would be working around the clock, and would have to either strike or resign until grading retrogressed back to the GPA system. I can guarantee you that all our teachers wish, from the bottom of their hearts, that they could give us more detailed feedback on our homework and classwork. But teachers, like us, have their own lives and families to worry about when school is dismissed, and, also like us, cannot operate without sleep. The brutal reality is that, in educational institutions as direly underfunded and overcrowded as those in America, grading that can be done in a few clicks (GPA) is most viable for the human instructors that learning revolves around. A utopia in which kids are graded effectively would demand dramatically smaller teacher-to-student ratios and salaries that more fairly express the manual and cognitive labor that goes into teaching. This, as you all know, is an uphill battle in America. Although the incoming Biden-Harris administration has made some dazzling promises during its campaign to increase federal financial support for schools, politicians are famous for hollow promises, and if the Senate remains Republican in the years ahead, the odds are vain that education reform laws will be passed and enacted while we are still students.
I would never suggest that we totally eliminate grades. I can admit (as can many fellow students reading this) that my GPA, and the college admissions that depend on that metric, is the singular reason I show up to my classes, especially during virtual learning. Grades, either mathematical or narrative, are vital to education, which is why I believe they should be developed for intellectual growth rather than convenience. GPA goes beyond classrooms. Grades condition college degrees, college degrees condition salaries, and salaries condition financial survival. An argument to change grading is an argument to change and expand the process by which young adults become self-supporting adults. How can a nation claim it wants all its children to gain higher education when its universal grading system accuses so many brilliant students of failing? As of 2019, less than 36% of Americans own a four-year college degree in a nation whose economic industries are owned and managed by college-educated adults. If schools are as obsessed with statistics as I have portrayed them to be, this one should be on their radars.
We may never know when COVID-19 will finally end, but we can be sure that the schools waiting for us will not be the same version of the schools that we attended before quarantine. More classes and instructional activities will include chromebooks, fewer campus police officers will be hired, and classroom sanitation will be more regular and more extreme, among other changes. As miserable as it is, distanced learning has been a massive awakening for our educational institutions in America. The transition back into normal classrooms should, at the same time, be a transition towards a brighter future for schools. GPA is something that I would be happy to kiss goodbye.
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