Commentary: Problems with the grading system

Picture this. You have a chemistry test and begin studying two full days before, leaving adequate time to review unit conversions, empirical formulas and other important content.

Thanks to your hard work, you walk out of the test feeling just as confident as when you sat down to take it. You get the results back one week later.

You stare at your test and see an ugly 50% staring back. Meanwhile, you overhear a classmate, with a near perfect score, bragging about how they studied the period before the test.

But who really mastered the content?

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Although it varies across schools, the principle is the same; in each class they take, students receive a letter grade between A and F that corresponds to their performance.

While summarizing a student’s cumulative performance with a single letter may simplify parent-teacher conferences, this method of evaluating students certainly creates more problems than it solves.

The structure and emphasis teachers, parents and peers place on the grading scale skews the purpose of school toward maintaining a certain letter grade and away from actual learning.

If students are seeing the same grade when they memorize content compared to when they take the time to understand it, then most students will opt for memorizing and regurgitating.

This is especially true in math courses.

Students (including myself) tend to memorize the steps of a specific problem so that when it appears on a test, they are able to complete the problem perfectly. These students may receive an A, but if they were to complete a modified version of the same problem, they would likely have difficulty doing so.

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Memorization prevents important skills from being generalized to a variety of problems. However, because the grades they receive are unchanged whether they are memorizing content or truly understanding it, students see no reason as to why they shouldn’t memorize.

These problems become worse in high school.

Over 60% of Americans view grades as a major factor in the college admission process, according to the Pew Research Center. Worries over college admissions further encourage students to resort to rote memorization to maintain their grades.

The added pressure from college applications further skews the purpose of school away from learning. That being said, schools should be equipping students with knowledge and essential skills to help them navigate the real world.

How can students be expected to think critically or creatively if the grading scale disincentivizes them from practicing those skills in school?

In a nutshell, it takes more effort to learn and less effort to memorize.

As a high school student, I can certainly attest to the ease of blatant memorization. This approach to school continues unaddressed as the grading scale also causes problems for parents and teachers.

Simply seeing an A average on a report card makes it difficult to determine whether a student is truly understanding taught material or simply memorizing.

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In fact, Jessica Lahey, an English teacher who also writes about education in the New York Times explains that she often had doubts about the grading system due to its unpredictability in determining whether students had mastered a topic.

The grading scale blurs the line between mastery and memorization, making it easy for students to take the easy way out and difficult for parents and teachers to kindle a love for learning.

What’s the solution? Considering potential alternatives to our current letter grade system are vague and unclear, sweeping reforms may prove to be impractical. However, uncertainty is not an excuse to ignore a problem within the education system.

To ensure a letter grade accurately reflects understanding, schools could independently take the initiative to educate students on the importance of learning over memorization or structuring homework and tests that accurately assess critical thinking and understanding.

This does not mean making classwork overly difficult, but rather teaching students how to successfully apply their skills to a variety of problems.

Even if these aren’t the best solutions, simply identifying and informing others of the problem is one step ahead of where we started.

Divya A Shanmugam is a rising senior at Jackson High School.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: A to F: Evaluating students by letter grades poses problems