“What did you get?” These four small words seem to have the largest impact on how I feel about every assessment handed back to me. As a student, I spend a lot of time obsessing over my own grades, using them as representations of my intelligence, success and even self-worth. For some, grades can serve as a motivator, but for many, including me, it can be a toxic cycle that inhibits learning and progress.
In some ways, it’s inevitable that Menlo’s culture is so hyper-focused on grades. “When you aggregate a ton of kids with the same general academic motivation, it does leave a hyperfocus on the outcome, which in the academic case is a grade,” Upper School Wellness Counselor Jake Fauver said. But, there are steps that Menlo students can take to make their relationship with their grades healthier.
The biggest step towards making our relationships with grades healthier is letting go of them from time to time. I am not recommending, nor do I practice, ignoring every grade I get in a class, but we don’t always have to check every single score we get on a test. Asking teachers to omit listing specific grades on some papers and tests handed back and focusing on errors or areas of improvement are options open to every student and can carry lots of benefits.
Letting go of the grade you receive can help forge more honest and healthy relationships with your teachers and peers: ones based on your interest in growing as a student rather than scoring well. Teachers appreciate students who take initiative in asking for feedback and areas of improvement rather than fixating on the number of right or wrong answers they wrote. “I actually have a decent number of students who want to come talk about how to get better and don’t even ask how they did on the essay, […] and that to me is beautiful, because they’re really just here to continue learning,” Latin and English teacher Tom Garvey said.
De-emphasizing grades can also actually improve your academic performance. Studies from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) show that academic stress related to grades worsens academic performance. Managing a full workload on top of always worrying about the grade you get is stressful, so by forgetting the grades every once in a while, we can reduce the academic stress that can be harmful to our learning process.
In the haze of grade obsession, we tend to forget that learning new things is fun and that acquiring new knowledge helps us better understand the world in which we live in a way that is gratifying and irreplaceable. That freshman history class isn’t about dates and DBQs; it’s a map of the world today, how we got here and the power that each of us has to decide where we go next. But all of that can quickly be spoiled by obsessing over grades. By moving past those scores, we are able to focus on what brings us to Menlo in the first place: learning. “It wasn’t until college that I stopped [focusing entirely on my grades], and I enjoyed school so much more. […] It’s just so freeing,” Fauver said.
At the end of the day, you won’t remember the score you got on that random geometry test freshman year. But you will remember the way school made you feel about yourself. I hope we leave Menlo knowing grades do not define us, but the relationships, experiences and learning we reinforce at Menlo do.
