Is an Obsession With Grades Killing the Spirit of Adventure?
by Stephen Hume

Ah, January, season of the unavoidable—Christmas bills, chilblains, assessing mid-term exam results and the attendant stress for parents with soon-to-graduate teenagers. After the pleasure of giving and receiving comes the dreary hangover of fretting about grade averages and whether they will be adequate for admission to the post secondary education that society now insists is essential for success, whether in government, business, the professions or the trades.

Counselors have a formal term for this state—“grade anxiety.” Parents who encounter it will be familiar with its manifestations: nervous unease and obsessive worrying about averages, the most recently posted grade cutoffs and admission requirements of the university, college, technical or trades program the kids hope to enter.
There’s even a suite of identifying symptoms. They include elevated heart rate, decreased appetite, stomach upset, an inability to concentrate and constant, niggling anxiety about academic performance and evaluation.
Apologists for the current system of grading will argue that this is all part of kids’ preparation for entry into the real world.

But is it?

What business would put up with a tendering process in which requirements for a successful bid were subject to arbitrary changes at the whim of the contracting authority? Worse, that the process routinely resulted in one class of bidders obtaining advantage over another? Yet that’s exactly what happens year-to-year in the competition for post secondary places when administrators manipulate admission “standards”—they go up and down like so many yo-yos—as a method of controlling enrolment.

Some university calendars warn prospective students that admission requirements to various faculties, schools and departments may be subject to change without notice throughout the year. To use another familiar analogy, what kind of football championship would permit the referees to move the goalposts closer or further whenever they felt like it? Or to reward one player for kicking an 85-yard field goal then disallowing the next one because it went only 88 yards instead of 90?

I recently checked at one leading Canadian university. Admission standards for some faculties there varied by as much as five percentage points in just three years. Students who applied in 2005 needed an 85 per cent average to be accepted; students applying now need 90 per cent. In other words, for a student who met the admission standard in one year the consequence of deciding to bum around Europe might be failure to meet the grade cutoff on returning. Quite a price for getting out to see the “real” world, an experience that should be an important part of every young person’s education.

Then there’s the fact that grades don’t really mean what they purport to mean. For example, the University of Victoria formally rates a grade of C+ as “satisfactory” but some of its programs require students to score a B+ to continue, which means that a grade of C+ is actually unsatisfactory.

The same phenomenon was noted at the University of Lethbridge where Dr. Robert Runté, part of a task force on grading, discovered that while students in 1985 considered a mark of D to be just scraping through and a grade of A as excellent, by 2005 they considered a B- as just scraping through and an A+ as excellent.

Another of the Lethbridge researchers, Dr. Margaret Winzer, put it another way: A remains A but B becomes A, too, C becomes B and so on. Thus C, which once represented the average on a bell curve of academic accomplishment, now represents below average accomplishment.

No wonder the kids begin to obsess about the minutiae of their grade points and what they mean for the averages that post secondary institutions demand for admission. And no wonder parents find themselves sucked into a vortex of stress that seems to be the antithesis of what higher education purportedly seeks to achieve.

Leaving aside questions about the ethics of a system in which the objective “standards” deemed necessary for admission to higher education are actually used as management tools to manipulate enrolment, is the ensuing obsession with grades good for students, learning institutions or society at large?

Some of us even begin to wonder if the system of governing admission to post-secondary learning institutions by focusing on grade point averages hasn’t actually served to degrade the learning experience in high school and to erode the purpose of higher education because it encourages students to intentionally register for the courses they find easiest and to deliberately avoid the more difficult subjects that they might find challenging and ultimately more fulfilling.

By way of examining that proposition, consider the following anecdote regarding a conversation I recently had with some bright Grade 12 students. They are on their schools’ honor rolls and are preparing to apply for admission to universities here and in other provinces. One student is strong in the sciences, not so strong in English, particularly when it comes to composing essays, but has an abiding interest in literature and what it can teach about a culture’s values, social history and world view. The second student is not so strong in mathematics but strong in the humanities, particularly history, French, English literature and writing but has an interest in physics, particularly as it relates to astronomy and cosmology.

Neither elected to take a course in the field about which they were curious. Instead each chose a course in the area where they were they were already strong performers—an additional science course for one and an advanced English course for the other.

“Are you kidding?” said one in disbelief when I asked why not just take the unusual course for fun, out of curiosity, for interest’s sake alone. “This isn’t about fun, it’s about competing. I need a high average to get into a good university. I can’t afford to have my average pulled down by a lower mark. Neither can anybody else.”
Here we have some good students who would undoubtedly have benefited greatly from exposure to fields about which they were curious but uncertain yet they felt compelled to forego an experience which would have stretched their knowledge and broadened their intellectual horizons because the penalty for the possible loss of a few precious percentage points on their grade average might mean forfeiting admission to the university they wanted.
A Stanford University lecturer, Dr. Denise Clark Pope, found similar pressures when she studied the psychological stress on high school students in California while researching her book Doing School: How we are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students, which was published in 2001.

“People don’t go to school to learn. They go to get good grades, which brings them to college, which brings them the high paying job, which brings them to happiness, so they think,” one weary, cynical high school student told Pope, according to an interview published in the Palo Alto Weekly in 2005.

This is a sad commentary, less on the students than upon the dysfunctional framework of values created by adults whose responsibility—one might reasonably assume—is to encourage young people to broaden their horizons to include what they don’t know rather than limiting their efforts to what they do know.

If it’s true that we learn most not from our easy successes but from our difficulties and failures, does it make sense to punish teenagers for trying subjects about which they are curious but may find difficult while rewarding them for specializing in fields that come to them most easily?

In fairness to the kids, it’s hard to argue against their common strategy of opting for the courses they find easiest. When university admission is decided by margins of a few percentage points and there’s no certainty what average will be the threshold for your particular graduating year, why would anybody risk compromising his or her chances of meeting the sliding standard?

So the name of the game is not taking risks with difficult but challenging subjects, it’s gathering insurance points that will keep grade averages as high as possible. Hence the obsessive anxiety over the one per cent difference between A and A- on an essay, quiz or examination.

And I know from my own university and college teaching that this conditioned response to grading carries through into post secondary education, where students—in my opinion, at any rate—spend far too much time worrying about why they got a B+ instead of an A- and not enough time experimenting, exploring and chancing new approaches to old material or carving out new concepts and territory for their own research.

Yet if students want to play it safe, who can blame them? As parents, educators and administrators, our own obsessions with grades and standards—I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s observation about the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing—has encouraged the evolution of the risk-averse culture they now inhabit.

Everywhere I turn these days I hear the mantra that intelligent risk-takers, explorers who choose poet Robert Frost’s “path less taken,” people who are prepared to fail in pursuit of a challenging idea are the engine of the entrepreneurial economy, the advancers of science, the leading lights of art and literature.

Those are the values higher education is supposed to inculcate.

Instead, we seem to have a classic example of the law of unintended consequences.

Supposedly, exposing students to a rigorous grading system in their final years of high school objectively measures their knowledge and prepares them for the “real” world of competition.

Yet where risk-taking in which risk-taking, experimentation and exploration are essential components of real business and academic success, what we’ve actually created is a system which pays lip service to excellence while encouraging students to play it safe, avoid the unknown and go for the sure thing. Unreal.

Stephen Hume is guilty of grading a paper or two in his 16 years of teaching.