Are Grades Killing Education?

We’ve all been told that grades are how we measure success and learning in school. But what if that’s a lie we’ve all just accepted? In this episode, we take a hard look at the role of grades in education—not just how they work, but who they really serve.

Grades are often treated like neutral indicators of learning, but they shape the way students think, what teachers prioritize, and how schools define success. They create pressure, foster competition, and punish mistakes, even though mistakes are how we learn. They claim to reward merit, but often just reflect privilege.

So who are grades really for? Students? Teachers? Employers? Or are they part of a system that values sorting above individual growth?

If you’ve ever felt like grades don’t tell the whole story—this episode is for you.

Hit play and join the conversation that could change how you see school forever.

Transcript

A student asked his Zen master how long it would take to reach enlightenment. Ten years, the master said, but the student persisted. What if he studied very hard? Then 20 years, the master responded. Surprised, the student asked, How long would it take if he worked very, very hard and became the most dedicated student in the whole ashram? In that case, 30 years, the master replied. His explanation, if you have one eye on how close you are to achieving your goal, that leaves only one eye for your task. This parable suggests that grades can sometimes be the enemy of education. And if that's the case, we should be asking the question, Why do we grade? Why do grades exist in the first place? Have they helped or have they hurt students? Have they facilitated learning? Exactly in whose interests are grades, anyway? Welcome back to "American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. How is your education facing a cheating epidemic? Some colleges report that up to 70% of students routinely cheat on graded assignments. That's not just a few bad apples. That's nearly everyone who is playing the same game. Grading, originally meant to measure knowledge, has become for many students a game of getting by, rather than of actually learning. And so I want to explore this idea of what grades are for, and if they put so much pressure on students to achieve and to perform that they end up undermining the very education that these students were supposed to be getting. So to make this very concrete, I want to ask, are grades serving students, especially working-class students, who are trying to build a better future for themselves? Are they really about something else entirely? I want to break down why grades exist, how they've failed students and teachers, and even employers, and who actually benefits from them, if anybody. How might education even look without them? The first thing we should start with is a sort of genealogy of grading. The idea of grades hasn't always been around. Education, before grades, used to be about mastery. You would study under a mentor, whether it be in philosophy or in the law, or in some kind of trade. And you would just work with them until you understood the subject well enough to become a journeyman, basically, to go out on your own and work under your own without supervision. Instead of grades, you had real-world practical tests. A blacksmith had to prove himself, for example, by making something, right, a harness or something like that. You didn't get an A on some kind of test or, you know, have a multiple-choice quiz about how to make a sword or a plowshare. Rather, your final exam was in the performance. Did you make something that worked or did you not? It might surprise many of us to know that letter grades were not widespread in America until the 1940s. Even as late as 1971, only 67% of primary and secondary schools used them. The ancient Greeks had a very different kind of sense of assessment. They did use these sorts of like quizzes and asking questions, and, you know, having people generate their arguments through, like, I guess we would say, like oral reports or papers or something like that, but they were formative and and not evaluative, meaning that these were assignments that were meant to get you to practice the work, not to evaluate what you already knew or understood. Harvard did require exit exams as far back as 1646 in order to attain a degree, but it wasn't until 1785 when Yale University president Ezra Stiles implemented the first grading scale in the USA, based on four descriptions. Oni, second Oni, Inferioris, and Pajorus. Something similar to A, C, and F. Other universities started following suit in the early 80s00s, but it's important to note that most of these schools hit their grades from their students because they were afraid that knowing their grades would encourage a kind of competitive environment. They would ultimately distract them from learning. Our modern grading system comes from William Ferris, a Cambridge University professor in the 1790s. He invented the numerical grades because it let him process more students faster. Grading was thus a time-saving hack, more than an improvement in education. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, grades were standardized to help sort students into the rapidly expanding public school system. But the goal wasn't better learning. It was sorting students out for different kinds of industrial jobs. Factories needed a way to rank the workers. Colleges needed an easy way to admit their students, and employers wanted a quick way to sort their applicants. And thus, grades became a way to control and to categorize people, not so much to help them learn. So it seems like we should be saying that grades are really about somebody else. They're not four students. They're a service that universities or schools or the faculties of these schools provide to other people to help them determine whether or not this student has mastered something. It's a way of saying like, yes, this student isn't a student. This student is a B student. This student is a C student. And so now you know what you're paying for. But if they don't actually facilitate learning and if they hinder it, that might not be true. Once we've introduced the concept of grades, it is entirely possible to strategically manipulate the system. That is, to game it in order to get good grades without necessarily getting the kind of education that it's supposed to represent. So we need to know, do grades really help students? Well, the first thing we can say is that grades tend to focus more on performance and less on learning. You know, imagine you're in a school. You have two choices. You can take the time and energy to actually understand the material, or you could cram for the tests and then forget everything immediately afterwards and move on. Most students pick option two because grades reward short-term success rather than actual knowledge. So, it's possible, at least, that grades can actively harm learning. Studies show that grading increases anxiety and decreases some sort of intrinsic motivation, meaning that students tend to learn less, but tend to stress out a lot more. Students stop asking questions like, what do I want to know? And start asking questions like, what do I need to know for the test? According to some studies, grading reduces learning by doing four really terrible things to a student's psychology. The first thing they do is they increase the anxiety for the students and ultimately the professors too. This just makes it more difficult to concentrate, more difficult to learn. We do not do well in an anxious and stressful situation when we are trying to pick up new ideas and new skills. Imagine trying to take a test on a subject that maybe you've studied at least a little bit, but there's a man walking around with a gun. And if you do poorly on the test or get an answer wrong, he's going to shoot you. You're more likely to get an answer wrong just by the presence of that man being there than it being reflective of the fact that you know it or you don't know it. The second thing that they do is they tend to focus on extrinsic as rather than intrinsic motivations, like I just mentioned. This means that we're more interested as students in getting a gold star or A+ or some sort of other external sign that we have learned rather than that feeling inside of us that I have achieved something. This motivation then tends to be short-lived. It's like the joy one gets from shopping. As soon as one has purchased the item, the joy is gone; rather than if you have an intrinsic sense of the value of something, you appreciate having it for the rest of your life. So it's not just about shopping then it's about having this thing, about possessing this thing. And it's the same here. An extrinsic motivation tends to be short-lived rather than an intrinsic motivation which tends to be lifelong. The third thing that they do is that they encourage strategic performance. The students start to ask like, how how little do I have to do to get the grade that I really wanted to get? In this case, they're not so much interested in learning knowledge as they are in achieving a grade. And so their performance will be based on such. They will cut corners. They will not dig as deeply as they can. They will cheat. They will fake. They will try to use every method at their disposal for shirking the very work that is going to give them the skills that they're supposed to be learning and need. The fourth thing that it does is it creates a high-stakes learning environment, which makes the classroom an unsafe space to explore new ideas. You cannot be creative when you feel under threat. You cannot be original. You need a sort of safe space in order to do that kind of learning. And by making it a high-stakes learning environment, the pressure to perform ultimately outweighs your interest in fiddling around, trying to explore things, playing, making it an interesting time to grow and to learn. This is because what grades ultimately do is they tell us there's a right and wrong answer, and you have to know which one it is. And that's not always the case. It's especially not the case in certain fields like art or the humanities. For example, did you know that students who receive only feedback on an assignment rather than a grade or even a grade and feedback make the greatest improvement in their learning? Just talking to them about what they did wrong and what they could have done and done better usually has the best effect here. Grades tend to end the learning process by essentially saying this is over. There's nothing more to be done at this point. Whereas feedback tends to continue the conversation, saying, oh, I see you made these mistakes here. Well, let's talk about how we could do that better and then try it again. So, feedback has to be descriptive, but it's not evaluative if it's going to be useful. You're not making a judgment call about this student's abilities. Instead, what you're doing is trying to get them to see what mistakes they've made mistakes on and correct those. Objectivity isn't a virtue if what we seek is dialogue and growth. Grades for the class performance generally are often very difficult, but even the specific grades on particular assignments can be misleading. Especially in fields, again, like the arts and the humanities, grades rarely track any of the things that professors find important about their own discipline.lines. Tests. Tests are not very useful for learning. Much of what we teach in, say, a field like philosophy, besides the history of philosophy and maybe formal lossic, does not consist of testable facts. Papers. Papers can generate understanding, but they end up being treated like gotcha assignments. You know, Write me a paper about this subject. And if you're wrong, ha ha, gotcha. Rather than an opportunity, like they could be, for dialogue and refinement. Attendance, attendance tracking could be useful, but only in showing that a student is missing, not really what it is that they're missing. Students end up thinking that it's the number of days that is the problem rather than the subjects that they missed and how those subjects might influence some of the other things that are being taught in the day before or the days after. And we should never fail to recognize that all grading makes students competitive, rather than cooperative learners. This means rather than relying on each other and reaching out to each other to support their learning, they end up turning on each other, trying to withhold facts. And students picked up this lesson pretty early on and stop reaching out to their peers for support. They don't do study groups because why would you want to study alongside other people who are ultimately going to be your competitors? Why help them? Okay, so maybe grades aren't for students? Well, we always kind of knew that students hate being graded. Most of us hate being graded. We hate evaluations. We hate it when our employers evaluate us. So the question is, who are they for? Maybe they're for the teachers themselves, right? There's a way of judging which students to put more time into and which ones are just phoning it in and you can sort of let them fall behind. Well, the reality is, is that's not true either. The more time a teacher spends on grading, the less time they spend on teaching, teachers who, instead of reevaluating what is working or trying to find new and more innovative ways of teaching the same lesson, end up trying to teach a kind of test. How can I get my test scores up for my own evaluation? How do I get them to regurgitate the things that I need them to regurgitate on some sort of standardized testing, things like that. Professors spend hours grading instead of improving lessons or mentoring students. And worse, grading can be entirely subjective. Two teachers might give the same essay completely different grades. So what are they really measuring here? The metrics that teachers use can be useful, but they're always limited. Metrics lack precision, not only in the humanities, but even in fields where we would think that they would not, like mathematics. And there tend to be very generic. I mean, can we really distinguish between an A and an A minus or even an A and a B? Some of these arbitrary measures, you know, why is it that 90% is an A, but an 89.9% is a B? It just seems kind of silly. Tests, it turns out, ultimately do not measure what a student knows, but what professors think they ought to know. And that tends to turn education always into a form of indoctrination. Tests could be taught differently or used differently, should I say. Testing could be formative rather than evaluative, like we were saying about the ancient Greeks. I could be asking you questions like a quiz, not because I'm trying to get you to give me the right answer, but because I'm getting you to think about the problem or spend some time working on it. You know, you might have to go look things up. You might have to wrestle with it for a while. And in that way, you are forced to grow and you are forced to learn in order to give a response to the question. But again, that is not evaluative. That is formative. So maybe we could say that grades ultimately help employers. It seems like the history that we began this episode about suggested just that, that it was a way for employers to rank graduates.. Well, it turns out, employers don't really care that much about grades, either. Google, Tesla, and even many law firms have just simply stopped asking for transmission.cripts. Why? Because grades don't tend to predict job performance. There's something known as grade inflation in college, where everybody seems to get an A. Facilities don't want students to fail. It's a poor reflection on them, and so they push students to achieve. They push students to do all the things they need to do to get good grades. A student with a 4.0 GPA might be terrible at certain important skills, though, like collaboration or problem solving. Whereas a C student could ultimately be the most brilliant innovator. Skills tend to matter more in a lot of these jobs. And studies have shown that employers prioritize things like experience, communication skills, and problem-solving ability far more than they prioritize GPA. So if it's not for students and it's not for teachers and it's not for employers, who's really benefiting by grades? Well, the short answer is colleges and universities. Grades. Grades create a ranking system that makes colleges look competitive, not their students, but the colleges with each other. The higher the average GPA, the better the school appears to be. Colleges often market their average SAT scores and their GPAs as proof that they're doing a good job, that they are an elite institution, that produces top-notch students. But that says nothing about the real education those students are getting. I mean, I personally have known several people who have gone to the Ivy League schools, and I can confirm for you, they are dumber than a box of hair. It's hard to even be in the room and have conversations with them because they tend to think of themselves as incredibly smart, because they went to one of these top-notch institutions. And yet at the same time, they can't seem to put two and two together. They can't seem to think critically about it. If it wasn't in their textbook and taught to them by their professor, they don't seem to understand it or have any ability to understand it. That's a serious problem for an organic learner or a critical thinker. These students that are coming out of these elite institutions, and by far, I don't mean all of them. There are some really great people that come out as well. They tend to be very well read and very well educated in the sense that they have come across a lot. But their ability to put that into some sort of synthetic knowledge is limited at best. Kids coming out of other schools do it just as well, if not better. And that's my point. So the testing that comes out of these colleges and universities is not always indicative of the types of students and how good they are at the skills they're going to need to be successful both in business and in life. The other person who really benefits from grades are testing and education companies. There's a whole testing industry out there, the people who generate the SAT, the ACT, the GRE, they profit off of these grades, these standardized tests that exist to keep the grading system alive. Employers who what really easy filters, you know, like maybe a temp agency or an HR department head would also feel like they benefit from grades simply because they could be used as a hair-splitting criteria. Instead of taking the time to assess real skills, some employers might just opt out and say, well, you know what? This guy's got a 3.8 GPA. And that's it. We're going to hire that, which is lazy hiring, and it's not very good, but it is easy. Bef, we quit this subject and talk about what can be done about this issue, I want to go into a little more detail about something I mentioned earlier, about the problem of grade inflation. Today, over 40% of all college grades are A's. So if everyone's getting an A, what does that grade actually mean? If everyone is above average, then they're not. Some Ivy League schools, and not all of them, have begun shifting over to a kind of pass-fail system as opposed to the traditional ABCDF. Some universities like Harvard and Yale have this optional pass fail classes. Like you can use it on certain classes. Others have like a, I believe Yale has a a credit D or fail option that the students can exercise. I believe currently close to the end of the semester. They can't do it through the whole semester, but as they approach the end, they can take it like right up to the edge. And this allows the students to still pass a class that maybe they're not getting the grades right, but they are getting something out of. They're not failing the class. They are learning something. It's just maybe not exactly what the professor wants them to learn or what the department thinks they ought to be getting at out of it. And that could be okay. If you're not going to be a philosophy professor, there are certain philosophy classes where you should be able to learn certain really valuable lessons from that aren't necessarily what the class is about. Taking a history of modern philosophy class, for example, could teach you a lot of really important life lessons, even if your goal isn't to learn the history of modern philosophy so that you can turn around and teach it. You don't need to necessarily get the grades the way the professor is grading it in order to get really good things out of it. And this gives you that option. But working-class students at a lot of public universities are graded harshly, which ultimately affects their scholarships, their job opportunities, and worse than that, their self-confidence. If you've ever heard anything about learned helplessness, it's simply the idea that if you can shatter someone's self-confidence, they tend to become helpless. They feel like they can't find the answers when they need them. They're not confident. They don't put themselves out there because they already believe no matter what they do and how they go about things that they will be wrong. This is terrible. It makes it so that you can't push them to do better. You can't push them to succeed as an educator because they've already learned how to be helpless. Either tell me what I need to know so that I can regurgitate it onto the test or fail me and just let me go home. That attitude signals the death of all learning. So what are some of the alternatives here? Well, an easy way to do it is to shift over from grading to something more like self-evaluation and self-reflection. Sudies have shown that that tends to improve learning. It does so by promoting self-res responsibility in one's own learning, and therefore assists people in developing themselves as self-regulated learners. They come to want to learn because they want to know more, not because it's going to get them the grade that they're expected to have. Such learners are capable of learning and honestly evaluate themselves for their entire lives then. Reflection also encourages recognition of how educational experiences are changing them as a person. They can see the difference of themselves before and then after. Self evaluation and reflection also can be done in a graded classroom, but it's most significant when it is in a gradeless classroom. But there's a resistance to allowing students to self assess. And that seems to tap into our unfounded fear of unfairness or some kind of inequality in the classroom. But the fairness analogy here is misguided, because students shouldn't be compet competitive for grades. In my own introductory classes, I generally accept, without question, any sort of self-assessment that the students give, as long as it's within about a letter grade of where I myself have assessed them. More than a letter grade, I expect some sort of explanation as to why they think that they deserve a different grade from what I have for them. Sometimes they have a good one. And, you know, leniency tends to be my default position and things like this. I'm also open to giving my students, you know, extension and incompletes in order to get them to do the work. So it can also be pretty hard to convince me that they deserve a different grade if they haven't gone in ahead and done the work. They've had numerous opportunities. And if it just doesn't get done, then clearly they didn't really want to put in the effort to learn. Another quick note about why self-assessment can be better than grades is, well, it turns out professors are always biased. They can't help it. It's just human. If you have to evaluate another human being as part of your job, your biases will come into play. It is unavoidable. And so I have inherent biases, and I'm never going to be able to shake those. But by allowing my students, at least some measure of self-assessment, I can help mitigate those kinds of biases and I can make sure that they don't end up hurting my students. I don't know what kind of mental health issues or learning disabilities some of my students have. You know, some of them have gone through the process and have accommodations, but not all of them have. And by having them reach out to me and tell me how they feel about things can be an eye-opening experience. I have had many students who I was positive got very little out of my class. And in their own self-assessment essays have shown me that actually, no, they got quite a bit and had life-changing experiences. If you're a student, an educator, or even an employer, I encourage you to think about what grading actually accomplishes in your world. Could we learn more, know more, even be more without it? Start the conversation, ask your professors, your colleagues, your school administrators, who are grades really for? I challenge you to rethink education as a system that serves everyone's potential, not just letters or new numbers on a report card. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us, and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Viscrates.buzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.