It is a sad fact that much of a Hopkins student's life revolves around grades. More often than not, students on campus stress over midterms and papers and sacrifice much of their health and well-being to get a certain grade. In a society founded on this ideology of meritocracy, grade point averages in college are a huge factor in determining the social class and status of individuals in their adult lives.
Grades are a tool for social mobility, that is undeniable. Nonetheless, it is apparent that the motivation for learning becomes tainted when a person's self-interest becomes intertwined. The ideal of education becomes corrupted when grades get involved in the process.
Is it time to move beyond grades then? Should we throw out the whole system of grades all together?
It might seem crazy to some people for considering the possibility of a college without grades. The system of grading was established in the late 1700s at Cambridge University and has been an established academic norm since then. It seems incomprehensible to many people that an educational institution without grades could function in American society. But if we analyze it further, educational institutions with grades do not really function well either.
First of all, grades suppress intellectual curiosity. Most students will not openly say it, but students would prefer receiving a good grade in a boring class rather than possibly getting a poor grade in an intellectually-stimulating class. Because of grades, classes merely become "a means to an end" and they learn for the sake of the grade and not for the sake of learning itself. And when students receive their grades, they will probably not continue investigating the content taught to them any further or even begin to think about what they learned in class again for the rest of their lives. Since they have received the grade, there is no need to inquire further about the content. I'm not denying that there are some extraordinary students who uses grades as a motivator to continue learning, but again they are not the norm.
Secondly, grading is intrinsically a combative interaction between student and teacher. Ideally, teaching should be a collaboration between both the instructor and the student as they investigate some particular phenomenon together. However, grading, by necessity, is not collaborative. The instructor has to evaluate students' knowledge and mastery of the material and that will oftentimes raise tension between him or herself and the student. And you will not complain to Newton or Einstein about your poor physics grade; No, you will complain to your professor about it.
Lastly, the amount of time professors spend grading exams and papers is ridiculous. There is a reason why teaching assistants do all the grading. Grades, more often that not, do nothing to contribute to a student's learning. Thus, grading is an extremely inefficient way of trying to stimulate students to learn. It is a large investment with relatively low payoff. For professors, at best grades are secondary and derivative and at worst they are an unnecessary burden.
It might seem politically impossible to eliminate grades, yet there are schools which have done this quite well. In Annapolis and Santa Fe for example, St. John's College avoids textbooks, lectures and examinations, de-emphasizes the importance of grades, and focuses on the interaction and participation of students rather than simply obtaining of rote knowledge.
The implementation of these educational policies are not just ideal, but practical as well. They are also producing some positive results. In the Princeton Review's "The Best 357 Colleges," St. Johns College was number one in the nation in the categories of "accessibility of teachers" and "best class discussion," and made the top ten in the categories "best overall quality of life" and "best overall academic experience".
Because of the failure of grading to stimulate learning, it seems quite reasonable that the established grading system in academia will eventually die out. Institutions of higher education such as Hopkins need to take the initiative and start discussions about implementing alternative forms of student evaluation for the benefit of not just Hopkins' students but for education as a whole.
