An Open Letter to my (ADHD, OCD, and Dyslexic) Brother about Grades by Luca Bernardini (17, California)

Noah, 

You are easily one of the smartest people I know. You annoy the hell out of me most of the time, but it’s not because you’re stupid. I have never met anyone who’s brain works the way yours does. Remember the other night when you helped me with my math homework? You had a strange method of solving the equation, but, somehow, you got it right. Somehow, without showing any work at all, in your brain, you put the pieces together to find out the value of x. 

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If you did that same method in school on a test, the teacher wouldn’t have given you full-credit. In the corner of your paper, next to the deduction of points, the teacher would have written “SHOW YOUR WORK!” in bright red ink. Maybe you didn’t show this work because you find it an unnecessary step to solve the problem, or maybe you didn’t because you chose to use a different method than the one taught in class—one that makes more sense to you—even though your teacher does not like that. Either way, your work was not on that paper, and it cost you. Let’s say that you did all the five test questions without showing the work your teacher prefers, and they have a policy in which the correct answer counts for only two out of the possible five points per question. In this situation, you’d be graded a ten out of twenty-five; a 40%; an F. Fail. You failed it. But you aced the test. Five out of the five questions given were answered correctly. 

And this score weighs you down. Now, you must go home and tell Mom and Dad the grade you got before they check the gradebook and see it. Then, you have to see the disappointment written across their features—the how-come-our-bright-son-keeps-failing-these-tests look? And, even though they’ll tell you that at least you tried your best, you try to defend the score, try to tell them that you got all the right answers, that the teacher made the choice to take points off based on something other than your accuracy—but none of that matters now. What’s done is done. Forever will an F be written in the gradebook, there to mock you for not being “smart enough” to show your work. 

It doesn’t make any sense. Why is it that you got the right answers, but not an A? I can see the teacher’s point of view here: showing your work can be seen as necessary for proof of students not cheating and direct evidence of their learning, but what I don’t get is why it must later be converted into a letter grade and affect a student’s GPA, which is (overly) important for their future applications to colleges and/or jobs. Interestingly enough, though, it turns out that students are the most incentivized to cheat because of grades; from 2002-2015, the International Center for Academic Integrity surveyed 70,000 high school students, 95% of which admitted to cheating—to get better grades. So, although showing your work can be used as proof of a student’s genuine work, not grading students' work (using our current system, at least) will altogether give students less reason to even try to cheat, and rather focus on learning. Then, with a different grading system, it won’t matter if students, like you—who don’t naturally feel the need to write down their work—show their work or not. They won’t be permanently graded on that small detail, but preferably on their overall learning. (It’s also important to keep in mind that there are other methods to prevent cheating that can be implemented instead of showing your work, but taking away the incentive to cheat [grades] will make it all together less of an issue.) Not only that, but, considering a reasonable purpose of the American education system to be nurturing students’ love of learning and exploring their curiosities with encouragement, our current system of grading completely defeats that goal. Instead of having the measurement of learning build off that purpose of education, we have a system where a student receives a letter that “defines'' their skill level, and pretty badly, too. To go back to my previous example, cheating to get an A instead of a D shows not only a failure in the public education system’s grading—the students aren’t demonstrating their own learning and rather their classmate’s—, but also a failure in achieving this purpose of education. Those aforementioned 95% of students don’t exemplify their love of learning by cheating, they exemplify their desperation for a good grade—the letter A. 

Noah, I know that you probably think that I love grades, that I find school so easy, and that every A does its job to inflate my ego—but I don’t. I hate them. I work so hard, and spend so much time on my assignments to keep up my GPA. And I’m exhausted. I miss my free-time. I miss being able to hang out with my friends. With you. I miss life. Grades aren’t motivation. They’re threats. Blackmail from the education system that if I don’t try my absolute best, give 210%, on every single assignment, study until my eyes bleed, I won’t get into college, and I won’t succeed in life.
 
In fact, our current system of grading, according to researchers Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt, had the original purpose not of motivating students (like most people believe), but easing communication between institutions. No wonder they don’t work! They literally were not made to benefit student learning! 

I have found ample evidence to prove the harsh realities of grades. Listen, this may be boring for you to read, but it proves a point I need you to hear, so just please power through it. Alli Klapp’s 2014 study proved that graded “low-ability” students received lower subsequent grades and had lower odds of finishing high school when compared to ungraded “low-ability” students. This establishes direct proof that students don’t find letter grades motivating when they consistently get lower grades. Seeing a D on every paper, especially those they tried their hardest on, causes the student to not want to continue putting in the effort without seeing results (a.k.a. A’s). The main pattern I saw among my research into grading was that direct and descriptive feedback provides the most effective results to increase student learning; a study from 1986 by Butler & Nisan gave one group of students solely descriptive feedback on their work, another just a grade, and a third absolutely no response. The results showed that the group who received descriptive feedback performed significantly better than the other two groups on subsequent tasks. The grade, on the other hand, did not actually appear to enhance students’ future performance at all. The Feedback Intervention Theory builds on this, describing how grades focus a student’s attention on themselves and their grades rather than learning, which leads to a worse academic performance. Students who receive real, helpful feedback, however, focus their attention on learning and bettering their work, contributing to better academic performance. 

Thank you for getting through that for me, Noah. I hope that these statistics better help you see my point. No one considers grades all that helpful, except for, arguably, the college admissions office and job interviewers (although the fact remains that they aren’t really that descriptive). You, personally, just happen to find it harder to get the infamous A’s than some other students--definitely not because you aren’t intelligent enough, but because your mind doesn’t coincide with the ideologies of a teacher’s opinion of A-level quality. You’re brilliant, especially with your skills in art and engineering—and you can easily succeed in these disciplines in your future. I, on the other hand, could never dream of being a successful artist (or engineer) in my lifetime, and I’m a straight-A student. It’s unfair that your grades don’t reflect this part of you. 

Grades, at the moment, aren’t weighted to your strengths, and having to rely on them for your future remains an ineffective way of doing things. Now, I don’t know the solution. If I did, I wouldn’t be a junior in high school. I’d be some major education influencer making a difference out in the world today. I’ve heard theories though, some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t. (My favorite would be some sort of system that emphasizes how the student can better their work and learning with help from their teachers through a mix of pass/fail and skills-based evaluations.) I do, nonetheless, believe that an answer to this exists somewhere, and, most importantly, if all—or at least most—of our institutions become willing to put in a bit of extra effort to give up our current process of grading for the betterment of our nation’s children, we will find that solution. 

Until then, though, a C, a D—or even an F—, in this pathetic system of grading, should not discourage you to foster your love of learning. We have to get it out of our heads that a straight-A student is smarter than a straight-D student, because that is just plain wrong. A straight-A student just got lucky enough that the grading system plays to their strengths, or they just know how to talk up to the teacher giving them the grade. Or perhaps they do currently know the material better, but it cannot be said that a different grading practice (that’s encouraging and descriptive) is unable to do better than our current system in effectively teaching students material; if we were to try something new, which we definitely need to do, we may see great results, making every student an “A-student.” Again, right now the grading method is not fair. No, not until a change is made will it ever be. School should be about learning, and learning to love learning, and grades don’t allow for that, nor do they accurately measure a student’s capabilities. So never, ever, feel ashamed of your mind, no matter what grades your teachers give you. Keep working hard, keep trying. It’s the system that’s messed-up, not you. ​