Growing up, I was the guy who got good grades.
In college, I was the guy who got good grades.
In graduate school, everyone got good grades. In fact grades in grad school– at least in English–were like Halloween candy. If you showed up and did the work, your GPA stayed at 4.0.
There were ways in which that was nice for me– a career 3.98er who at each level lost the flawless 4.0 to something (in junior high, it was gym class. In high school, it was AP Chemistry. In my undergrad, it was needing to take a 300 level French class with no refresher 200 level courses). But it was in graduate school that the real truth of grades became clear to me: they’re largely arbitrary.
Now it’s hard for a part of me to accept that. Between letter grades and test scores, a large portion of my early-life identity was based on scores. I wasn’t handsome. I wasn’t super-charismatic. I wasn’t a star athlete.
I was a smart kid. Usually I was the “smartest” kid in any group, up until graduate school, honestly. It was my identity. It was how I defined myself.
But something happened to me my senior year of undergrad that planted the seed for me to really understand how grades work. A professor who didn’t like me particularly well (or liked me too well) gave me an A- even though by points, I hadn’t lost anything in his class. I overheard him in the lobby talking about it to my mentor, and his reasoning for giving me the grade was that he “thought” I needed “to be brought down a peg.”
That wasn’t against policy. I mean I suppose if I’d threatened to sue based on having heard him say that, I might have had a case. But when I worked at IU later, I was told by the department chair that such things were the discretion of the instructor as an evaluative moment.
Later that same semester, while serving as the TA for another course, I watched the professor grade final exams. He gave the first one an A, all glowing comments. He then read a few more, and he reached for the first one and added a “-” next to the A. “If this one is an A, that one has to be less than an A,” he explained to me.
The university where I work now is great. I mean really, other than having a weird support issue with 2L learners, a bit of racism, and sometimes downplaying the alcohol, drug and rape problems (like every college), it’s the best college I’ve been to or seen, and I’ve attended classes on over half the Big Ten campuses and was briefly enrolled at UC Berkeley. Miami is a great place. I’m not being sarcastic at all with that. I mean it. I’m glad to be a part of what I’m a part of.
But one problem we have that many high caliber campuses have is a familiar refrain: grade inflation. Or course AMERICA has a grade inflation problem. At some point we changed it so that C, which meant average, meant “terrible” and F, which used to mean terrible, means “you are unworthy.” D is structurally unused, and in reality B is what C should be. It’s really pretty messed up. We live in a society where people rarely give the highest rating on anything… except grades. Then people expect their As.
There’s a secret, though. I mentioned that earlier and it sort of faded into the background as I got here. I’m ready to tell you my secret.
Grades don’t really mean that much.
Let me pause for a second to get the obvious part in here: grades do the work that teacher’s evaluations do (if you’ve read my argument against how those are utilized). They present a presumed baseline for students and allow us to compare them across-the-b0ard. In a world that needs something we can quantify, that’s what grades do. They serve as markers and limiters. They’re gate keepers.
And I’m not saying that they don’t matter in that regard. If you’re under a 2.0, you better do something with your life. If you have a 4.0, that likewise tells you something about yourself. And it’ll tell other people that.
But grades are largely arbitrary as a way of measuring people. For example, I have a colleague I won’t name drop here who is vicious with grades. It’s rare for a student to get an A from this person. In my class, I tell students the first day that if they do all the work– even if it’s not exceptional but is all done and fits the parameters– it’s almost impossible to get less than a B+. And those classes are at the same level in the same program on the same campus.
So what is an A worth?
In the other faculty members’ class, it’s a rare honor, something that only one or two people a class receive.
In my class, it means you did what I expected you to do every single time you needed to do work.
And we’re both doing it “right,” as it were (though I’m more likely to get criticized for grade inflation, if we’re going that route).
I try to impression upon my students that their grades matter but not in the way they think.
They often serve as an accurate correlation: high grades and high aptitude usually go together.
But when you are done with college, and you go to get a job…
… your new employer isn’t going to be impressed by a collection of As.
This is the secret. Right here.
You’re not in school to get As. You’re in school to learn things and build skills. You need to make stuff.
Because when you go to get a job, your 4.0 at a great school won’t mean a thing if you don’t have the experience and the work to show that you’re capable.
Meanwhile if you get Cs all the way through a degree program but make amazing portfolio pieces and network and do quality internships, not a single employer is going to say “oh, you had a C average? Sorry, we can’t hire you.”
I happen to have a nice collection of GPAs. I have high passes (and one weirdly discussed “okay, you passed, but…”s) and my standardized testing scores were so high that MENSA tried to get me to join (such a non-Rick thing– I didn’t do it). As far as stats go, I have always had those stats.
But those stats didn’t get me a job. They didn’t get me into graduate school, even (though if they’d been low enough they might have kept me out). What makes me relevant in my field, and why people allow me to do what I do for a living, is that I built skills and make stuff and understand things that many people don’t. In a world with Google, I represent something you can’t just find with a boolean input.
When I grade my students, some people would say I go “easy” on them and others would say I’m too “hard” on them. It’s all relative. But I remind them again and again that in my mind, the grade is the thing we have to do as part of the transaction. A student pays to take my class, comes to class, does work to learn to do things, then at the end I have to assign letters and numbers that indicate how well I believe that student did at whatever it is we were doing.
But the important part is the learning to do the stuff and the stuff that is created.
So if you’re worried about your grades, take it from someone who worried about grades for about 27 years of his life: that’s not what you should focus on. They’re fun trophies to have from your academic life, but the important thing is to learn. If you focus on just getting As, you’ll miss the real chances to learn. You’ll be too careful, too by-the-book.
Get an education from your educational career. If you just want a collection of achievement trophies, there are numerous games for that. They’re quicker and cheaper than a college experience.