What do you think about when you flashback to high school? I think about the grades. That's what it was really all about. What classes you should take and what teachers you should hope to get all in order to get the oh-so-important A's. I played along, for the most part. Deep down I'm not a go-with-the-flow kind of girl. I like to do what I want to do and to do it when I want to do it. I'm a "I want it and I want it now," type of girl. But, I tried my best to play along, always picturing how I would soon be at college where I can finally stop playing games. A nerdy girl's dream: To go to school to learn, not to get grades.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. Am I in the Matrix? Even at the number one public university in the United States, we are still playing games.

The grade game in college is played similar to the grade game in high school. You scheme to get certain professors because you heard that they are "good" or their tests are "easier". In discussion section you may raise your hand to ask arbitrary questions to bump up your participation grade. You may go to office hours consistently in order to become one of the favorites.

Sure, I'm learning, but is it for the sake of learning and out of my own curiosity? In high school, the grades were to get into a good college. Now in college, the grades are to get a good job.

My first issue with this is how "good" is defined. Banking jobs are considered "good", but I certainly don't want to spend the next five years of my life working eighteen hours a day. The second issue with this is how there is no concern for learning. I'm taking calculus now (Math 115, perhaps the hardest class I have ever taken) and I'm learning a lot, but I'm not going to get an A. I'm probably going to get a B. A big, chunky 3.0 will go into my precious GPA. To my own embarrassment, this has kept me up at night, and my mom can verify that I've shed some tears over this.

Yet, in my other classes I'm going to get A's and I'm not learning nearly as much. I can now find derivatives, second derivatives, implicit derivatives, and I can even explain to you what a derivative actually is. So my point is why does the grade matter? Grades have become a symbol of achievement, but I think I have achieved a lot in Calculus. Even though I won't get an A, the B should not diminish my success. The letter should mean nothing. And the B certainly isn't going to some critical downfall in my life that will cast a shadow over my entire future. It's just a letter, albeit one that isn't as favorable as an A.

In my ideal world, grades don't matter. It's what you learn that matters. It's what you take away, what you can apply to your everyday life.

What I want to know is why does the grade matter? Why is that what we judge ourselves on? Sure, I got some things wrong on the test, but I got the majority of things right. This isn't meant to be an angry rant on Calculus, it's meant to make us think about why we are so grade-centric. If you learned something, I would consider that a huge success. For many of us college is going to be the last time we go to school. We've made it to the end of a very long educational journey, and now we're at the final stop, the last time we will get to focus on just learning. So why aren't we doing that? The pressure of grades takes away from the importance of learning. It truly belittles the flow of scholarly knowledge that should be happening at the final stop of our educational voyage.

It's not that I have bad grades and am calling for a toppling of the system as it is because it's not working for me. It's that I'm tired of playing the grade game. I want to take a class because I am intrigued by it, not be scared away from it because it is known as a "hard" class. I want to just learn because that's what school is meant for. When else will I have the chance to just be concerned with learning?