The whole school system around the world is dominated by grades. The pupils and students strive to get grades as high as possible (because they need them to get into another school, to make an impression on a potential employee, please the parents etc.). On the other hand educators try to make the grading system as strict and accurate as possible. Corporations or corporation-like NGOs developed world wide accepted standardized tests that are considered to measure all sort of things.
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Grades are, in theory, meant to measure the degree to which a student knows the things related to a subject and has the competences required by the subject. Now we can discuss if a grading system captures all the important dimensions of knowledge and skills in a particular field. In my opinion most of them don’t, but that’s not what I want to discuss now.
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Let’s talk a little about knowledge and skills. Possessing Knowledge in a certain subject means to store in your memory information on that subject. To the day there are debates if we actually forget (ie. Information is deleted or lost from the brain) or can’t remember (ie. The information is still in the brain, but we can’t retrieve it any more). This doesn’t really matter now because the main idea is that with time we can’t access information that was acquired a long time ago.
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There is a solution for (better) remembering: the information must be retrieved frequently making the link to the information in the brain stronger. With skills things are not exactly the same, but there is some similarity: one can lose some skills over time or lose some of the accuracy of performing a certain task if they are not practiced.
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Coming back to grades and school. In my opinion schooling should have the goal of teaching - giving knowledge and skills - young people that will be useful in adult life. Now going back to the earlier paragraph about memory, how much of the knowledge acquired from school do we actually remember when we finished school? Not much would be my answer. How much do we remember 10 years after finishing school? Very little. On the other hand, we carry our grades (from kindergarten to master degree) all our lives and in many cases they receive a rather high importance. Imagine the situation that you have finished high-school or university (college) studies a few years ago (5-10 years) and you decide to make a change in your life and continue your studies and go to college or get a master degree. That makes perfect sense for many people that didn’t have many opportunities in their early years. Even in this situation the institution that you’ll apply at will use grades as a measure for your capabilities. Does it make any sense?
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The answer is yes and no. If we want to measure any kind of possessing knowledge using grades it makes absolutely no sense. Most of the knowledge acquired during school is lost (or we can’t retrieve it). Remember how students study for exams and read hundreds of pages, take the exam, get a high grade and 3 weeks later can’t remember even half of what they read; 3 months later they might remember some general ideas. So it really makes no sense to measure knowledge using grades.
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So what is the reason we use grades? What do grades tell us? Well, they tell us how hard working is (was) that person. We can all agree that there is a direct relationship between the amount of hard work (study) and the level of grades (that is if cheating is eliminated). Another thing that I believe that grades measure is the level of conformity to social norms. If someone has high grades means that s/he wants to be well seen in society. This is only a speculation.
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School should teach young people to work hard and that this is the “solid” way to a good life (although no guarantees are given). Teaching this is very important for any society. But, to be honest why should anyone spend 10-16 years in various education institutions (schools) only to learn hard work. This can be learned working on a farm or on a ship or somewhere else? I’m not saying that people shouldn’t go to school. On the contrary! But why the only metric thing we have when we leave school is a sheet of paper with some figures on it that should tell (at least to a certain degree) how “good” we are?
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I’m not against grades per se. Grades and scores have the big advantage of being metric (1 is smaller than 2 and we know what the difference between 1 and 2 is). What I say is that schools are using a wrong measure, if their goal is to teach. Also there is too much focus on getting high grades and scores for standardized tests and very little focus on actually learning and teaching useful things in a way that will ensure a higher retention rate in later years.
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Many schools and universities are very proud on what they teach that professors are top researchers, on their strict and exclusive admision criteria etc. At least from my experience most of them should not be proud on how they teach.
