by Jessyca T

Created on: April 08, 2009

Grades matter to most people, most of the time, regardless of whether or not they agree with the grading system. Whether you're a grad student competing for funding or a fifth grader just trying to make it to the sixth, grades matter. And I mean really, really matter.

Though we might not like it, some of us might even think it's a horrible system, North American society is largely driven by accreditation and ranking. School is the most obvious grade driven terrain, though not at all the only place where fates are doled out numerically. From immigration to getting a driver's license to deciding the status of a restaurant, we develop and rely on systems of ranking to help us make informed decisions. Even as I write this article I am hoping to be ranked in the top percentile

The question then becomes; how informed are our decisions really? How reliable is an evaluation grid that can't possibly measure each and every point or bit of knowledge, and which can actually be designed to exclude many? How reliable is the opinion of one critic when he or she has a unique sense of taste, or a bad association with the subject? Grades can be deserved, undeserved, close to accurate, or way off the mark. Grading is subjective, exclusionary, and problematic at best. The alternatives, unfortunately, are just as complex.

Those who don't support the competitive nature of letter and number grades seek alternate ways to evaluate work and learning. A holistic approach to education requires a more holistic approach to grading. Alternative measuring tools like de-streaming, self-evaluation and pass fail options exist, but in my opinion, they will never be able to permanently replace numeric scoring. On a large scale, the value of people's work is easiest to measure and rank in quantifiable numbers. The educational and labour markets are becoming increasingly globalized and so the pool of people to rank is becoming larger than ever before. Our society is becoming more and more competitive and creating the absolute need for rigid and easily transferable evaluation systems. In the international market it is just not possible to base decisions on pass/fail, or read and sort through hundreds of thousands of self-evaluations.

No matter where you are situated or what types of knowledge you value, grades will matter at some point. It's whether or not you understand the meaning behind the number that will determine how successfully you can manipulate it. As much as grades matter to us all, they can't permanently determine our fate if we decide to fight, or leapfrog, for a higher position.

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