Grades Aren't Fair

They don't measure anyone's worthiness. But they have their uses, and inflating grades is a bad idea.

As a professor, I’ve given (and gotten) a lot of grades in my life. So I know first hand, from both sides of the desk, the complicated feelings that grades engender. There’s stress, anxiety, frustration, and even embarrassment or shame if things don’t go as well as you hoped. But grades can make also you feel grateful, proud, and validated.

Either way, grades stimulate emotion because we experience them as measuring us and our worthiness.

But they shouldn’t.

Because there’s something about grading that it’s easy to forget: Grading isn’t fair. It’s not meant to be fair. In fact, it can’t be fair. Grades still have social value. But they aren’t capable of being a fair measurement of worth or worthiness, because they aren’t designed to be.

I know, I know, the world’s on fire and grades seem unimportant by comparison. But grades are on my mind because a faculty committee at Harvard College just proposed changing the existing grading system to fight off grade inflation. The number of flat A grades had ballooned to 60% of all grades given to undergraduates, and the proposal limits the total number of flat As that can be given in any given course. Seen in the context of the fight to save higher education, suddenly grading isn’t as niche a topic as it otherwise might be.

For what it’s worth, I think the proposal is a good idea. But don’t start thinking it’s somehow going to make grading fair.

Grades helped me get ahead in life, so I’ve thought a lot about them. At the very academic school I went to from age 6 to age 18, we started getting precise number grades when we were 12. We got them on every quiz and every test. We got them every quarter in every class. We learned how to compute our grade point averages in our heads. Not only can I tell you what my average was when I graduated from high school, I can tell you the averages of the two people in the five years ahead of me who had higher GPAs at graduation (Hi Jon! Hi Ellen!).

If that wasn’t bad enough, when I got to college, at the end of my freshman year, I found that I had gotten straight As. Now I had something to lose. When eventually I got an A-, I found out while backpacking in Europe over the summer with my best friend, Seth. I was so frustrated and annoying that he almost killed me. To this day, Seth says that it was the only time he seriously considered ending our friendship. I don’t blame him. I was awful. But hey, I graduated first in my class. From Harvard. They even gave me a little prize.

That wasn’t fair. One reason it wasn’t fair is that I had all kinds of advantages over many other students. I had been trained at a school where grades were everything. I had amazing teachers who taught me to write well and how to study and how to figure out how to give teachers back what they wanted to hear on an exam or a paper. The best of the teachers even taught me how to go beyond their own expectations and give them something original, which it turns out lots of teachers really like. If I hadn’t had these advantages, there’s no way I would have done as well in college.

The unfairness didn’t stop there. I wasn’t just school-smart. I was book-smart. I read a lot. I read fast. I had a big vocabulary. I wrote fast. I thought fast. I talked fast. (I still talk fast.) The system of grading rewarded these skills. It rewarded a particular idea of what being smart looked like.

How on earth could this system be fair? There are lots of people who are very smart in many different ways. But grading doesn’t reward most of those.

Taken to an even deeper level, what’s fair about rewarding being smart? On any dimension? Whether we like to admit that or not, people don’t start on an even playing field when it comes to intelligence. Yet we’re giving little gold stars in the form of A grades to people who we deem smart by the measure of school.

What grades do is measure how good you are at a specific set of skills. They measure how well you can play the game.

Knowing how good you are at school doesn’t necessarily translate into being good at anything else in life. Sometimes it has no relevance whatsoever. Sometimes getting good grades does turn out to be relevant to certain kinds of jobs or other life activities. That always needs to be figured out on a case-by-case basis.

So when you’re tempted to be carried away by grade-related emotion, positive or negative, stop and think about what you’d say to someone else who was feeling anxious or sad or proud about grades. You’d tell them to keep it in perspective, and not attribute meaning that isn’t there. You’d remind them that the grades mean something about academic ability and work, but nothing more than that.

Grade inflation is unfortunate only because it makes it impossible to figure out if you are in fact good at school. That makes it really hard to reward people for academic excellence and admit people to graduate programs where success is, in fact, indexed to getting good grades. (Like a pie-eating contest where the reward is more pie.) The whole idea that how you do in school should dictate what you do later is itself subject to many legitimate criticisms. But without grades, the whole thing is a non-starter.

There you have it. Grades are unfair. They still have some value, and that value is worth preserving. But don’t let them affect your inner life. Don’t feel too bad about them — or too proud of them. Take it from someone who has.