Schools and universities are astronomically different from how they were one hundred years ago. This is not a secret. Other than the fact that everyone is invited to the party that is school, what else is all that different? Well, somewhere along the way society has decided that there's a way to measure success and how well someone will prosper in the future, and that measurement is grades.

Grades are probably one of the worst ideas ever. Sure, there has to be a way to know that students are in fact getting anything from teaching material and actually retaining information, but at what cost? The pressure to do well in school only gets more and more intense as we come farther into this digital age that is based on numbers and technology and statistics. Not that these things are worthless, because they aren't, but that they have become the focus of institutions today. We have a focus on doing whatever it takes to get all the points we can.


I have had experience with grade anxiety, and it's not uncommon. The pressure of getting the grade and the perfect GPA is can be very harmful to mental health. It's another measure of being perfect, and for people prone to perfectionist anxieties these are dangerous waters to constantly be wading in throughout years of high school and college.

Is there really a great benefit to have such a strict system dominated by numbers and letters? Or is it like it is forcing students to obsess over "getting the grade" as opposed to getting more out of the class? What if instead of stressing over memorizing slides we could actually freely read the material and apply the concepts? Maybe it would be beneficial to put a higher stress on participation and projects, using class discussions as a more accurate way to discern understanding. Are we actually retaining any of these things after we get the grade we ruin our mentalities over?

There isn't a magic solution, I know, but there has to be a way to slightly alter the system to give a chance to those who struggle with anxiety and other disorders. Everyone learns and succeeds in different ways, and there shouldn't be a single point system to determine this.

And while college is still measured in 100s and 55s and 78s, it's important to remind yourself that you are more than these numbers. Standardized tests can't measure intelligence that is by no means standard. It is possible to be hard-working, reliable, responsible, and have time management and not have a 4.0 GPA. That doesn't undermine those skills that companies really want--skills that guarantee your success more than a perfect transcript.