A couple of years ago, I came home from school to find my sister locked in her room in tears. Immediately upon walking through the front door of our house, I remember cycling through a list of things that could be making an eighth grader so distraught. Was she sick? Did she break a bone? Were her friends being mean? Did something happen with a crush?
“She got a B on her science test,” my mom told me.
Throughout my time at college, I have watched friends and peers sacrifice their health, well-being, happiness, and sometimes even friendships in a desperate attempt to achieve perfect grades. All of them seemingly believe that you need perfection in every class you take to get into a good graduate school or get offered a high-salaried job.
Students across the country have bought into this idea since they were young. We go to school at an early age; we sit in neat rows; we recite multiplication tables and historical dates; we get medals and badges for doing well in school; and, if we get enough of these badges and prizes, life progresses in a linear march, from grade school to high school to college to a well-paying job to retiring with a large savings account and a nice house in the country.
But why? Studies such as those from Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research have shown over and over again that lateral thinking and learning in “wicked environments” — a term psychologists use for environments where the rules change every day and the work never looks the same — are the keys to reaching the upper echelons of one’s field. Notice that nobody mentioned straight A’s. In a well-known 2003 study on job recruiters, researchers found that, alongside the 40 percent of recruiters who didn’t take grades into consideration, another 15 percent of them actively selected against students with perfect grades.
I think that last group of recruiters might have been onto something. Students forced to learn in “kind” learning environments — environments where the rules never change, the guidelines are clear, and the work this year looks a lot like the work next year — often don’t go out into the wicked learning environment of the big wide world and shake things up. Instead, they conform.
The pursuit of perfect grades also tends to quash the very spark that got students into colleges such as ours in the first place. Picasso once said that “every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.”
Our admissions system rewards students who have gone through the education system and stayed creative. I, for one, wrote my college essay about tacos. Yes, the food. Others I know wrote about their love of books, their passion for dancing, how they saved for their Mustang sports car, how being bored fosters creativity, or their chickens. It seems from these examples that the admissions office does not only value grades — although that is undoubtedly a large metric — but how well a student found clever ways to connect their passions, dreams, creativity, or even just something random like chickens, to their schooling.
So why then is there such a large culture of achieving perfect grades at the College, and at schools in general? My grandmother, Gene Diaz, is a pioneer in arts in education, with a long career in higher education, and she might have the answer. She loves to say that “authentic assessment is about learning, not about grades.” If you tell students that “this is what you do to get an A, this is what you do to get a B, and this is what you do to get a C,” you end up perpetuating the sense that grades are all important and education is about accruing good ones.
Just the other night my grandmother launched into a story about how, at a conference she attended years ago, one of the speakers invited the conference attendees to go to the bowling alley below the conference hall and participate in “scoreless” bowling. Everyone was told how to improve and how to have fun bowling, but no one wrote down scores. They ended up inventing new games with bowling balls, innovating, and experimenting. They also all got dramatically better at bowling. “Once we took the limits off and removed the constraints and that pressure, it became much more lively,” she told me. “We were allowed to be creative.”
Like my grandmother, I genuinely believe that questions and mistakes are fundamental to education. If we students are scared of making mistakes because they lead to bad grades, we are never going to take risks, never going to experiment, and never going to innovate. And if you penalize mistakes — if you fail people not even for gutter balls, but for not throwing perfect strikes every single time — nobody is going to take risks. Nobody is going to get better. The very spark, curiosity, and perseverance in the face of failure that got us into the College gets slowly quashed. So here are some recommendations:
For administrators: Drop the pluses and minuses. Help make it clear that graduate schools and employers shouldn’t care about the variation between a 3.7 and 4.0. Make it harder for students to see their grades until the end of the semester. Avoid the trap that is believing education is about accruing points. It’s not. It’s about learning.
For professors: Tell students how to improve, but don’t tell them how they performed. I have a great English professor this year who has intentionally not given us a single grade the entire semester. I have no idea how I’m doing in his class, but I have learned a lot about writing, and at the end of the day, that is why I took the class. Also, make more collaborative projects. Encourage teamwork. Encourage peer review. That’s how the world works, so why shouldn’t it be how school works?
For students: Stop worrying about your grades. Instead of all that time spent studying and worrying, read or write a book, join a club, paint a mural, choreograph a dance, explore a river, design a magazine, or write an opinion on education reform and arts in education for The Williams Record. Who knows, maybe write three. Just forget about grades. They’re not good for you.
Felix Diaz ’26 is from Arlington, Mass.
