by Nachisha Lightsey

Created on: December 16, 2010

I Want an A+

It was barely a decade ago when I walked the hallways in high school assuming I had the world figured out. My friends and I were the smarty-arty kids whom loved classic rock, foreign films, and underground hip-hop. Our junior year was a turning point for all of us when it became blatantly obvious that high school would not last forever and we had to give our future some thought. Suddenly, the group split apart between the few that became obsessed with merit scholarships and the SAT’s, and the rest of us that were too cool for all of that. I will never forget the image of one friend, drawn to tears because she got an eighty-eight on a biology test. All she could think about is that it could potentially kill her nearly perfect grade point average. In those days if schools converting to a strictly pass or fail grading system was put to debate I would have been one of the people in the catfight for conversion, but not because I felt grading built completion and cheated intellectual pursuits. Myself and students like me at the time would have chosen pass or fail as a grading option, because we did not take our education seriously. We did not want to work as hard as our other peers who earned sky high grade point averages, but we knew that we did not want to be at the bottom or the barrel either. What separated us from our peers that excelled academically was not intellectual ability, quite simply the difference was hard work, and our grades reflected that. Although the current grading system is not perfect, it is the most accurate diagram that enables educators to pinpoint areas of needed improvement and strengthen the intellectual attributes of students.

Retired educator Joy Alonso is an advocate for the current grading system and its pinnacle assessment procedures known as examinations. In a talk she participated in at Tufts University she stated that, “A quiz on a reading assignment forces the student to do the necessary work before the quiz” (Alonso821). Alonso stresses that the presence of exams and quizzes in the classroom compels students to meet requirements, and without the pressure of vying for grades students would not excel. Most students would reluctantly agree with this, reflecting back on the many late nights spent cramming and hours at the library pulling their hair out. Alonso acknowledges that the current system is meant to challenge students to exceed expectations saying that, “In studying for examination,

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