Let me begin by telling you that I'm really not as aggressive as I'm about to come off. (OK, maybe I am.)

But regardless, here's your warning that I'm going to unleash a lot of thoughts and opinions, and I don't give a dang what you think about it.

As students of Universities across the nation, we are consumers. This is quite a popular phrase used on campus, especially in lieu of the recent events at Missouri. "If you're not getting the education you want," they say, "you should do something about it."

Well, this is me, taking my first step to doing something about it.

What is education. What is it. To you. Is it getting an A? (We all know you can get an A in a course and not have learned a damn thing, but that C you got in chemistry sure did teach you a thing or two.) Is education really the grades? If you graduate college with a sucky GPA, are you uneducated? C's get degrees. They sure as hell do. It doesn't matter what the difference is between our GPAs, in the end, our degrees will have equal meaning.

So is it really right to grade students subjectively on papers and short answer tests? Because these days, my grades are a whole lot of 'my professor doesn't like me, so I got a C' and mediocre grades stemming from a basis of nowhere because a rubric wasn't published and the assignment was unclear to begin with. Sound familiar? I thought so.

Now this isn't to mean that there aren't great professors out there. Ones that really encourage you to explore, and stand behind you in your education. They aren't afraid of your questions, they aren't afraid to be challenged in their own beliefs, and they like learning just as much as we do. But they're rare. Maybe you've had one, maybe you haven't. They're tough to find. And for every great professor, there are sixteen not-so-great ones.

It's the professors who stand on their high horse, who talk down to me, who tell me my paper is "mehh" and who give me mediocre grades with no evidence to back it up that really, really irk me. My feelings get hurt, and then the perfectionism in me doesn't understand why I'm not good enough for a perfect grade.

There's talk about test anxiety, "unhealthy competition" among students, studies on how to get us to pay attention better, how to make better scores, how to make the school look better, how to be a more competitive applicant, better suited for this, that, and the other. They all tell us to stop getting so worked up about our grades, stop comparing yourself to other students.... but no one's asking the institutions to stop making it matter so damn much. No one's pushing for learning and discovery. It's a system. A caste system. You're either 'cum laude' or you're not. You're either in Honors or you're not. And when they say 'it doesn't matter,' what they really mean is, "we're pretending it doesn't matter so we can blame someone else for the increasing numbers in student suicides on college campuses." It's an institution. One that causes a lot of students more mental stress than it's really worth.

So my question for you is: are you going to let the system play you, or are you going to play the system?