Hey, College Students—Your Grades Should Not Define You

Grades. Those simple, yet so stressful letters. Every semester, so many students push themselves to get that perfect A no matter what it takes. If it takes spending the entire weekend doing nothing but homework for 12 hours a day, or not being involved in any activities, they will do it. I personally used to be this type of person, and I know many others who either used to be or still are.

For those of you who are the type of person that stresses over perfect grades and a perfect GPA, I am going to explain to you my reasoning for no longer pushing myself to my limits in order to be seen as "perfect" when it comes to school.

Let's begin with the background of grades. What is the origin of a C being average? Or an A being perfect? The simplified answer to this question is that someone a long time ago decided that people should be separated by how well they understand a certain topic, and then use those separations to show ranks of achievement.

So yes, I am telling you that you are stressing yourself to your limits for letter divisions that someone decided to come up with a few hundred years ago.

If you feel as though you need to surf the internet to confirm my summary, then you are suffering from what is called "caring too much about caring about perfect grades," which is even worse than just caring about perfect grades.

What about grades in a specific class? Well first off, the percentage range of each letter grade is set by the professor of the course. This is just one way in which the professor has control of how difficult it is to get a certain grade in the course; and of course a lot of them think you should be able to fully understand every aspect of their fancy post-PhD level research by the end of the course.

What about your GPA when it comes to finding jobs? At this point I should clarify that this article is not intended to say that grades don't matter at all, because they do. The point I am trying to get across is that getting perfect grades is not worth the unhealthy stress they put you through.

With that, as long as you try in school enough to get B's and even some C's, you should be perfectly fine when it comes to employers wanting to hire you. More and more employers are interviewing using behavioral-based interviews, which shows that they are more interested in how well you will work with their current employees, rather than why you didn't get a perfect grade in Calculus 3.

In addition, once you have work experience, your college GPA will likely become less relevant.

In the end, your grades in college correlate to your future employment. Once you have been employed for 5 years and you decide to get a different job, it is likely that companies will be more interested in your previous work experience rather than you college GPA. I would like to reiterate that I am not saying anyone should just completely stop trying in school, but rather I am saying that maybe you don't have to try to be perfect when it comes to grades in order to feel successful and happy in life.