By the time college rolled around, I had made the decision not to check my grades at all. They had, quite literally, ruled my life during high school, and I was intent on making sure the future was different. This was not (fully) an irresponsible retreat from reality, but the consequence of some positions I began to hold about schools and learning. As a result, up until the end of my sophomore year, I never knew what letter grade I had received in a class or even what my GPA was. I never even got around to learning how to check my grades.
I knew how I did on tests and essays and the like. My policy was that, if the assessment is handed back to me, I’m allowed to know the score. In fact, knowing those types of scores was of the utmost importance to me.
To explain how I arrived at this strange and perhaps irresponsible decision, I am going to outline the general reasoning I used to get there. It will help to define some terms at the start. I’m going to use “marks” to refer to the individual scores one receives on specific assignments. 87/110 is a mark that one might receive on a test. “Grades” refer to numbers that are usually composed of the weighted averages of all of your marks. 88.4% is an example of a grade. “A,” “B,” “C,” etc. are also examples of grades because they are assigned by calculating the weighted average of your marks.
Here’s the reasoning:
- The objective of school is to learn.
- You should do things that contribute to this objective.
- Learning, roughly, consists of knowing things you did not know before.
- This is a two-part process. First, you must identify the things you do not know. Next, you learn those things.
- Knowing the marks you receive on individual assignments helps identify the things you do not know. Example: if you receive poor marks on a quiz that covers the binomial theorem, this is a good indicator you don’t understand the binomial theorem.
- Knowing marks on assignments contributes to the first part of learning. (2.1, 3)
- You should know your marks. (4, 1.1)
As the example in (3) suggests, marks are helpful because they give you feedback at a low level. What you receive on a single essay or test can often tell you what you know or don’t know with a fair amount of specification. This, I admit, mostly happens if you get the actual assignment handed back to you with a certain level of feedback. If you only know the “true mark,” or what percentage of points you received, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out the exact extent of your knowledge. Luckily, individual assignments often cover only a handful of topics, so it can be easier to infer what you missed.
So far, we’ve only established that you should know your marks. Great. How did I arrive at the idea these are the only things you should check?
This conclusion was established negatively. I couldn’t find any argument that appealed to learning that says I should check my grades. Let’s try to start from the first two premises of the prior argument, incorporate grades, and arrive at the conclusion we should check them.
- The objective of school is to learn.
- You should do things that contribute to this objective.
- Learning, roughly, consists of knowing things you did not know before.
- This is a two-part process. First, you must identify the things you do not know. Next, you learn those things.
We can’t use the same move as last time. Grades, because they are a weighted average of many individual assignments, can’t carry information about what specifically you don’t know. If you get a C in a Shakespeare class, you can convincingly say “I don’t know Shakespeare,” but how helpful is that? You’ve identified what you don’t know on a superficial level, but that statement doesn’t provide a useful direction towards actually learning the stuff. Are you shaky with Othello? Does the play format give you fits? Can you even penetrate Shakespearean English? A poor grade only says you need to do work. It does a horrible job of specifying exactly what needs to be done.
We’ve seen that grades are ineffective at identifying the things you do not know. The only remaining way to relate them to learning, and establish that you should pay attention to them, is to claim they somehow help you learn those things.
Now, how can grades help you in the act of learning? This is unclear. In what way does knowing the weighted average of your marks allow you to understand academic material better? A certain type of knowledge about the points you’ve earned doesn’t seem related to your ability to comprehend unrelated concepts.
I can see a skeptic coming up with a counterargument. They might say that knowing grades can give someone motivation to study and learn. They might want a better grade rather than a worse one, so knowing where they stand pushes them to spend time with the material. An attitude like this violates the first premise, though. A student who is motivated by grades supplants learning with credentialism as the goal of school. The student would have to reject premise 1 and commit themselves to a school experience that makes learning an afterthought. No good.
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This reasoning, in some inchoate form, was what was floating around my head when I decided not to check my grades after my first quarter of college, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, etc… I had a faint idea of what my GPA was since I saw the marks on the tests I got back, but it was very vague. Basically, I knew I wasn’t going to be on academic probation anytime soon.
I must also emphasize this is the literal truth. I didn’t peek here and there or do some back of the napkin math to get an approximate sense of my grades. I was in complete and utter ignorance of my official GPA.
And it was wonderful. For the first in my life, I felt a deep sense of academic freedom. I understood that I was at university to learn, and my behavior was fully consistent with this fact. I did close readings of texts when I could have skimmed them. I revised essays two, three times when I knew the first draft would do. I read more books in my free time than I had since middle school. I felt comfortable talking candidly with my professors and TAs because I wanted to learn, not grovel.
This doesn’t mean my college experience was/is faultless. An unambiguous focus on learning was somewhat of a compensatory mechanism meant to address the many faults I found in my institution. Nonetheless, the experiment was a success.
Readers at this point are perhaps left with several questions. “Riley,” they ask, “do you still not know your grades? Why submit yourself to such paralyzing uncertainty? Don’t you understand your GPA determines a significant part of your adult life, playing an instrumental role in considerations like, but not limited to, your attainment of internships, full-time jobs, graduate school admissions, scholarships, loans, and other professional opportunities? Are you out of your mind?!?”
In response to the first question, I currently know my GPA. This experiment concluded at the end of my sophomore year, but the effects are, hopefully, permanent. I understand what it’s like to put learning first, and, though it takes much effort, I intend to keep it this way.
An explanation of why the experiment ended addresses the remaining questions. I began to pay attention to my grades again because I realized the argument I gave above is wrong. Premise 1 is faulty. Ask anyone who isn’t a philosophy major what the purpose of school is and they will say anything but learning. Formal education can be about creating a workforce, increasing social mobility, instilling civic knowledge, cultural assimilation, personal maturation, landing a job, proving something to society, or proving something to yourself. All of these are valid ends of the enterprise. Surely, you can find an argument that appeals to one of them and concludes you should check your grades. Instead of reading “the objective of school is to learn,” premise 1 should say “an objective of school is to learn.”
Do I regret this decision? Absolutely not. I acted in full accordance with my values. Were my values those of an educational idealist, dismissive of the many social, cultural, and economic objectives of formal schooling? Sure. Should you ignore values arrived at via ample reflection because you’re unsure if they will change in the future? Almost never.
I’ll maintain that learning should be the principal objective of school, or at least near the top of the list. However, as soon as you introduce other grade-influenced ends into the mix, saying you should not check your grades is indefensible. That’s why I know my GPA now. I don’t obsess over it. I don’t stake my emotional health on whether it twitches in one direction or another. It is a metric that, for one reason or another, people care about. If I want to convince these people I deserve to study with them, work with them, or use their money, I shouldn’t neglect it entirely.
Yet, I remain committed to learning. I’ve seen what wonderful academic experiences are possible if I let it motivate my decision making. I recommend you take this idea seriously. If you do, this doesn’t mean you should ignore your grades. Just check them a little less often.