Every year millions of students head off to college all in an effort to build a foundation for their future. The goal- makes the grades to get the job. But does this emphasis on a single letter take away from the overall education received?
The emphasis on attaining good grades in college to overall earn a high GPA takes away from how students actually value their education. As long as a student makes a good grade in a course he doesn’t care whether he actually retained anything he learned or not. All that is important is that a single letter says he mastered the subject at the end of the semester.
Grades are a superficial gauge of a student’s proficiency in a subject. As stated in California State University’s Why Aren’t Course Grades Good Enough, “Course grades represent evaluation of limited objectives that often are not related to program objectives. At best, grades are a type of “formative” assessment. There is too much inconsistency from section-to-section and term-to-term…Secondly, there is an inherent conflict of interest when the instructor is the only evaluator of whether the students have met program objectives. Third, we really need to know more about the long-term learning and accomplishments of our graduates. What do they know and what can they do at the end of the program?” A good grade can be attained as simply as cramming before a major test or cheating off the nerdy kid who sits in front of you in your American Government class. This letter scale doesn’t disclose whether a student cheated or crammed his way through a course, yet it stands un-argued and supreme.
Grades perpetuate the cycle of “you pretty much cram your way through four years of school and you’re out with nothing to prove for the education you supposedly received but a few A’s and B’s and a 3 digit GPA.”
In today’s society, that suffices. That proves as tangible proof of gaining an education.
Students no longer enter a classroom with the hopes of learning something new and groundbreaking that will shape the way they think for the rest of their life, but merely attaining the grade that will exalt them to the next level. Amanda Jamerson, a sophomore hospitality management major at Georgia State stated, “We go to a lot of classes (esp. prerequisites) because we have to, not because we want to. At the end of the day a lot of the classes we take aren’t going to help us establish a career and make money in the real world. Grades are the most important thing in college, the classes that I’m taking to make these grades, not so much.”
More and more students withdraw their concern from the content of what they’re learning and concentrate it on simply breezing through the course to make another A. Each class is seen not as an opportunity to learn, but as another grade that must be attained. So students go on from one class to the next, accumulating grade after grade, and still learning nothing. Grades have already proven to be a debatable measure of aptitude within the educational atmosphere, but with all of the value being thrust unto making good grades, learning and gaining new knowledge has been placed on the backburner of education.
Is higher education simply continuing the mentality of perception over reality? That it’s not what you know, but rather what you appear to know? That a few letters on a watermarked sheet of paper deem you educated? Have students graduating from colleges around the nation truly even earned their degrees? Are colleges even producing capable prospective employees for the work force?
It’s no secret that a student must do what he/she has to. But receiving an education without ever truly becoming educated has become an all too familiar venom in the world of higher education.
**Citation from: http://gradstudies.csusb.edu/outcomesAssessment/1998forum.htm
