Grades Don’t Matter : The Truth about a Flawed System

Do grades matter? This is a question we often hear from confused students.There are movies like 3 Idiots that argue competence is more important than grades. We also see memes that say “a piece of paper can’t decide my future”. But we often discard these arguments in the face of reality. The “grades don’t matter” approach is countered by citing that grades are important for higher education and job placements. If that is the case, should we be focusing on the limited syllabus provided to us at school? Should we just focus on getting better grades? 

To answer the above questions: no, we should not be focusing on grades or a limited syllabus. Allow me to prove the irrelevance of grades by presenting the other side of the argument. 

Grades are an inaccurate measure of your mastery:

Let’s start from the basic question: what are grades? Grades are a measure of peoples understanding, skill, and mastery over a subject. You measure it through different assessments such as timed exams, vivas and maybe even practicals. The quality of the assessment varies based on your teacher and school. But even the best schools can only form an approximate measure of a person’s mastery. Keeping these concepts in mind, tell me what matters more, your grades or your mastery?

If you ask me, what matters is your mastery. Grades are not a dependable measure because it varies based on the quality of the assessment, teacher and school. In fact, a person’s performance at a specific time may vary because of so many factors that it’s almost impossible to accurately measure a person’s skill. For example, in my university, COVID resulted in 3 hour exams being converted to research papers. Instead of memorising the whole syllabus and reproducing it on a paper in 3 hours, they gave us sufficient time to do our research and produce a paper. They based our grades on the quality of research and writing. This resulted in a lot of students getting better scores because they were no longer under the pressure of remembering everything within a short period. In most real-life settings, you would have a similar time frame to the research paper to handle the situation. Unless you are defusing a time bomb or something, I don’t think any real-life scenario will require you to remember everything you studied in the past 4 months within just 3 hours. This is not to mean that removing the element of time or getting higher grades means it redeems the system of grading. The change in grades by removing the restriction of time shows how unreliable grades are in predicting someone understanding.  

Makes you wonder why constraint on time is an element in almost every exam? It seems like a redundant element that adds pressure on students, which may cause them to forget information they may actually remember. Remembering something for the duration of the exam is not relevant when the student may just forget the information afterwards. Only purpose it serves is to help form a hierarchy of students categorised as productive and unproductive. Existence of this hierarchy causes a lot of discrimination among students. Parents and teachers often favour the students labelled as productive. They give them all sorts of opportunities and encouragement. On the other hand, they often subject students lower in the category to punishment, both mental and physical, and often bullied by both parents and teachers. Imagine an inaccurate measure of your understanding being used to discriminate against you. Society accepts these discriminations blindly while the experience of the “unproductive” students are rarely discussed.

While the grading system creates its own hierarchy, it does not create a method by which someone lower in the hierarchy can eventually climb up to the top with effort. This brings us to the next drawback of grades: it creates the idea that humans don’t improve.

Grades are static, human learning is not:

Did you know Isaac Newton was a poor student in school? He was said to be nearly at the bottom of his class. Then how did someone who was at the bottom of the class grow up to be one of the most influential scientist of all times? Its because he improved his knowledge and skills with time. 

Sadly, most of the grades in modern education systems are static. Since it’s inconvenient to keep measuring a persons improvement or to come up with innovative methods to measure people, the system just assumes that one’s a loser, always a loser. Literally anything that proves that a human being can learn is proof that the static grade system is wrong. Imagine someone grading an infant learning to walk. As per the current system, if the baby falls once, the system would mark the baby as a failure that will never learn to walk. An employer that see this grade may think the baby may never walk. But babies do even learn to walk even though they fall down a few times. Just like that, most humans can master a subject, even if they cannot immediately grasp it. Not accounting for this possibility is a major drawback of the graded system.

So, grades are an inaccurate measurement of a person’s mastery that remains static for life. But the fact remains that people depend on these grades to judge you for higher education and employment. Allow me to explain why that is irrelevant.

We live in the age of information, move on from the old system:

Today we live in a world where information is available at our fingertips. Most ivy league universities provide free online courses. There are books written on literally every topic, and there are even less than ethical means to get these books for free. Higher education doesn’t matter because you can learn a subject by acquiring high quality academic sources online.

Employers want your skill, not your grades:

As for the argument for employment, an internal research at Google found academic track record does not determine success. They found grades are a worthless criterion for hiring. I am sure there are other companies out there that think the same way. Unless you are dealing with a particularly old fashioned interviewer, an employer is most likely looking for what value you can offer them. If you took the burden of teaching yourself, you undoubtedly will gain skills you can show off. Prove yourself through other means like publications or winning competitions. You just need to prove that you have a valuable and useful skill, the method does not matter. As long as you have something others need, you won’t find it hard to get a job or investment. 

That said, we should not use this as an excuse to avoid your academic responsibilities.Try to get at least minimum CGPA because there are companies like Goldman Sachs who have a different research that suggest that grades may not be completely worthless. They agree that grades aren’t the entire story, but they found that having a minimum level of GPA (3.0) can work as a screening mechanism to determine whether the candidates have functional capability in the field. 

Either ways, both companies agree that grades cannot be a major determining factor. The reiterate the idea that grades are an inaccurate measurement of a person’s skills. Then why do people still cling on to this inaccurate, outdated system.

To Conclude – a tool that lost its purpose:

The reasoning behind the argument “grades doesn’t matter” is not that you can get what you want without learning anything. It’s supposed to mean that your grades do not define who you are or what you can learn. A person who got 0 in maths can still put in the effort to become the most brilliant mathematician in the world.

To quote Goodhart, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. 

Grades were supposed to be a measure of your mastery over a subject. But the system lost its purpose, and it teaches students today to obsessively focus on grades, even at the expense of mastering their field. 

Grades represent an evil of society who’s function is to create a hierarchy that oppresses the “unproductive” and worships the “productive”. The purpose behind grades, which was to asses peoples mastery and provide feedback for improvement, is completely lost in today’s system of competition. But, since people still hold the idea that grades are practical, it still continues to exist generation after generation. Its responsible for the suicide of thousands of students.

Grades are a hallow system that lost its essence. It doesn’t matter because it no longer serves its original purpose. We need to oppose it because it’s a drawback of an old system, just like caste or patriarchy, who’s only purpose is to discriminate and oppress.

Further reading:

For non-reliability of grades: see this