Every student is told that their grades define how successful they are doing in school. Getting an A means you did amazing, a B means you did pretty well, and a C means you’re doing alright. These seemingly straightforward measures of success are frequently used to determine students’ outcomes later in life. However, the system often fails to accurately assess and reward student learning, and thus does not properly prepare students for life beyond school.
In order to fully understand the flaws of the grading system, it’s important to first examine how it came to be. According to an article by education technology journalist Audrey Watters, education was more apprenticeship-based before the Industrial Revolution. Teachers got to know their students on a personal level, students received individualized instruction, and teachers could personally vouch for the abilities of each of their students. Then with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, schools started to adopt systems that prioritized efficiency. This idea was first pioneered in 1792 by William Farish, a tutor at Cambridge University. His system, which standardized student assessment, mirrored industrial factory models that were used to decide whether or not products were up to par. It allowed teachers to evaluate a larger number of students in a shorter period of time, and it provided a scalable way to compare and rank students.
Within this standardization lies a fundamental problem: with grading systems modeled after old factory procedures, schools are consequently molding students into identical products of the system. As American futurist Alvin Toffler explains in his book Future Shock, “mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed.” However, it’s 2026, well past the Industrial Revolution. While this factory-like school model worked for the purposes of the past, it does not properly prepare students to navigate the modern world, which requires critical thinking skills and not just the ability to meet requirements.
Furthermore, the letter grading system does not accurately assess each student’s learning and effort in class. When asked about what getting good grades entails, Wilcox freshman Ceci Herrera said that students “need to put in maximum effort and go above and beyond” in schoolwork. Another student, Sierra Berkman, agrees that students need to be “hardworking.” Overall, the belief seems to be that more effort equals higher grades. However, these individuals also pointed out a number of other factors that influence their grades. For example, Berkman noted that the classes she had higher grades in are often due to prior knowledge she had going into the subject. “My dad taught me math when I was younger,” she explained. Despite this, Berkman is evaluated the same way as students in her class who do not have that extra support. Herrera feels that the classes she has higher grades in are due to extra credit opportunities and not necessarily because she is learning more or trying harder. She adds that in her mind,“the grade is just a reflection of what the teacher saw in you,” meaning that whether or not the report card says an A, B, or C is also dependent on each teacher’s grading philosophy. Because of factors such as prior knowledge, extra credit opportunities, and differing teacher perspectives, grades often do not accurately capture a student’s intellectual merit.
Students also feel that grades are not validating their true capabilities. “Grades will make me irritated when my mistakes at the beginning of the semester end up impacting my end semester grade,” Herrera expresses, pointing out that one letter often fails to capture the learning curve that she experiences throughout the semester. She feels that there are classes where her final grade reflects the blunders that occurred months earlier and not her growth and eventual mastery in the topics she learned. Wilcox freshman Lewhat Million experienced something similar. “In Spanish I have a B in that class, but I feel like since the teacher doesn’t put a lot of material into the gradebook, it doesn’t really reflect my performance,” she explained.
These student accounts clearly show there is much room for improvement of the grading system. Our systems should be teaching students to think for themselves and not just for a grade. They should accurately recognize students’ learning journeys and aid students in understanding where they actually are on the path to mastery. Schools are the very institutions responsible for raising the next generation with the skills needed to thrive in an ever-changing world, yet the current system oversimplifies the complexity of a student’s academic performance with a list of checkboxes resulting in a single letter grade. We need to teach students to be human beings, not machines.
