Grades Are A Tool Of The Past
One thing we know for sure is that grades are important. Our parents reward us when we ace exams, and so we have been conditioned to think that scoring As in school are important achievements worthy of our time. And for the most part, this is true: the approval of our peers and our parents and our teachers depend largely on our grades. So grades do matter. But there’s an interesting assumption to examine here: why do grades matter so much? Are they still as important now as they were 50 years ago? And perhaps – more importantly – why do so many of us accept grades as the de facto indicator of ability, without ever questioning the underlying logic of our grading systems?
I’ve been thinking about these questions for some time now, and I think I’ve come to some reasonable conclusions about them. My contention is that grades are no longer as important as they once were, and the implications from this idea are rather exciting, and scary, both at once.
It would be wrong to say that companies have wised up to the inaccuracy of grades. For the large part, this change has been due to a shift in economics as opposed to a conscious, calculated decision by market leaders.
The global economy today favors smaller companies over big ones. There are many reasons for this, but the basic ones are obvious: due to globalization and cheaper logistics, it now makes more sense for companies to outsource some tasks in order to stay focused on their core competencies. This has been a relatively new phenomenon. Never before has a smaller company been able to take on a bigger company – and win (Mazulio 1).
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If you don’t believe me, consider: in the past, railways would purchase steel refineries to manufacture the steel required for their operations; today, it outsources such operations to external – often international – companies. And this is but one example, in what is a remarkably outdated industry. The effects are far stronger and more powerful in technological companies. But, bearing these differences, what does this mean for grades?
It turns out that it is easier to measure performance in a small company, as opposed to a big one. If you do well, the company does well; if you do badly, the company does badly. This is not so for large corporations. In a large corporation, individual performance cannot be easily measured, because the organization is so large that your individual contributions do not have a significant effect on the bottom line. This is why grades have been so important to employers for the past few decades. The harder it is to measure individual performance, the more important it becomes to predict it. And because the economy has been dominated by large corporations for the past few decades, it used to mean everything to get good grades.
But this is fast becoming history. Grades matter less when you can directly measure what they are made to predict – which is real performance. Why bother with an indicator when you can gauge the real thing? Larger corporations are adapting in order to enjoy the benefits of being small – Google, for instance, forms small teams of engineers to develop and test new products, and presumably gauges performance based on those smaller teams.
If this seems a little incredulous to you, consider: just 50 years ago it was enough to get good grades to get a good job to retire comfortably. This no longer holds true. Today, we are not only aware of people who have succeeded despite dropping out of college, but I have friends who have either skipped college altogether, or who plan to drop out of school to do their own startups. And in big companies, there are now performance reviews, where before there were none. It used to be that seniority was all that mattered; young associates accepted a lower pay because they had to pay their dues, their times had yet to come.
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It seems to be uncomfortably real that grades are beginning to decrease in importance. At the very least, they no longer hold the make-it-or-break-it quality they once had. And so, if this is true, the trend begs the question: what does this mean for students? According to Goodman, not much. “I doubt that many employers bother to look at such grades; they are more interested merely in the fact of a Harvard diploma, whatever that connotes to them.” (792)
There is something that must be said here on creativity. For all the noise our education system makes about creative thinking, and critical thinking, their models of teaching such forms of thinking cannot be conceptually further away from the truth.
I began this essay by asking a series of interesting questions. I examined why grades mattered so much, why grades are so important to us, and why they may be irrelevant to a reasonable assessment of success in the real world. There is one question, however, that I have neglected to answer, and that is: why do so many of us accept grades as the de facto indicator of ability, without ever questioning the underlying logic of our grading systems? I believe this to be the most important question of them all.
One reason for this may be that we have been conditioned to think, since young, that grades are the be-all and end-all of our childhood existences. But there comes a point in time in which we are old enough and wise enough to challenge our own assumptions. So now the question: why do so few of us challenge this assumption in the first place?
I suspect the main reason for this is that we are taught, since young, not to think for ourselves. We don’t hear that outright, of course. No teacher actually tells us not to think for ourselves. What they do tell us, however, that has the same net effect as telling us not to think, are things like “That’s very good dear, but it’s not what the examiners are looking for” or “That’s not a proper exam answer”. I suspect that each time our teachers tell our children that, they lose the ability to think laterally, to think critically, and so gradually they don’t bother to think in terms of truth at all.
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Grades are important as measures of cognitive ability. But do grades matter as much as our parents say they do? The truthful answer is that no, they don’t, not anymore. Grades don’t matter as much as real-world performance does, and as it becomes easier to measure performance directly, grades will matter less and less.
But is this an excuse, then, to score bad grades? The truthful answer is that I don’t know. It probably depends. It is certainly a better use of your time to go out and build things, and learn things, as opposed to spending all that time learning to score well in exams – a skill with admittedly little real-world application. But on the flip side of that coin, grades – and by extension exams – are important elements in the learning processes of our education systems. It feels like a cop-out to take such a stance, but this is the truth. Just be to study for the sake of learning, and that exams are an indicator of that learning; and not the other way around.
Works Cited
Goodman, Paul. “What Value Do Tests Have.” Current Issues and Enduring Questions: a Guide To Critical Thinking and Argument, with Readings. By Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Adam.
Bedeu Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. 791-94. Print.
Manzullo, Donald A. “Small Businesses Drive the Global Economy.” Advertising & Marketing
Review. Web. 08 July 2010. .
