Wacky Wednesday--We Should Eliminate Grades

Note: Before reading the following arguments, please understand that they are not what I believe. On Wednesdays, I deliberately argue for wrong ideas, challenging my listeners to call and defend the obvious right answer, which is usually far harder than one would expect. This is a summary of what Wacky Andrew will be arguing, not a representation of what real Andrew believes.

~It’s always subjective, there are only degrees of subjectivity.
~Students learn to work for an extrinsic reward rather than for the sake of learning itself.
~Grades turn education into a coercive transaction rather than a voluntary or pleasurable one.
~Good students idolize grades and derive their sense of worth and identity from them, which makes them arrogant and also sets them up for devastation when they go to Princeton, where someone has to get the Cs.
~Bad students also idolize grades and derive their sense of worthlessness from them, which blinds them to their unique talents and their intrinsic value as people.
~The school setting is so artificial that grades are always misleading. It’s dominated by the visual/auditory learning style. Test-taking aptitude is the primary skill which most testing certifies. ~And creativity is heavily stifled in school.
~Graded events like tests, mid-terms, and finals primarily reward effective cramming rather than long-term retention and integration of material.
~It’s very harmful to children’s self-esteem to get bad grades.
~You can get great grades and be really stupid.
~You can get great grades and be a moral wretch.
~You can get great grades and have lousy social skills.
~When you get into your first real job, after the first year or so, the grades you got, the degree you got, and the place you got them become practically the same as worthless.
~The bell curve only applies to large numbers but it gets applied to small samples, such as 25 students.
~Different graders will assign different grades.
~When so much emphasis is put on grades, people will do anything to get them, such as exhibit cutthroat behavior and cheat.
~Grades create an adversarial rather than a collaborative environment in schools, but collaboration is one of the very best educational paradigms for both parties.