Grades vs Learning - Shifting Attention to What’s 

Important 

Students flipping to the very last page of their essays to see the grade rather than the 
comments. Parents emailing about their students’ scores rather than their growth. 
Government initiatives focusing on test scores and test scores only. Do any of these situations 
sound familiar? 

For many teachers and principals across America, the emphasis on grades in education is 
irritating at best and damaging at worst. ​Have students always been obsessed with grades? 
Why? Is there anything educators can do about it? 

The History of Grades 

While the answers to the questions “Why?” and “What now?” are more complicated, the 
answer to the first question is easy: no, students have not always fixated on grades. 

According to researchers Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner,​ grades are actually a fairly 
recent phenomenon​, dating only to around the 1940s. Prior to grades existing as we know 
them today, Harvard and other 18th and 19th-century universities relied on medals and class 
ranks to communicate how much knowledge a particular student gained while in school. 

Interestingly enough, the primary reason grades did begin to develop in the 19th and 20th 
centuries was to​ ease communication between institutions​. As more colleges were founded 
and those that existed grew larger, schools and teachers needed a way to communicate 
student readiness and accomplishment. 

Before the current A through F scale became ubiquitous, most teachers used a 100-point 
scale to evaluate their students. However, if you’ve read our​ ​article on rubrics​, you may not be 
surprised to hear that a scale with so many gradations was not very reliable, and researchers 
at the time advocated switching to a 5-point scale (A, B, C, D, F) to normalize scores between 
teachers. 

As Schinske and Tanner emphasize, ​neither the development of a grading system nor the 
subsequent revisions of that system were done for the benefit of student learning per se; 
historically, grades have existed primarily for institutions. 

Why Students Value Grades more than 

Learning 
If grades were not created with students in mind, why do students care so much about them? 
While it is tempting to blame teenage hormones or social media or any of the other usual 
scapegoats, students are ultimately responding to the structure of our education system. 

THE STAKES ARE HIGH 

Every grade counts toward the student’s overall GPA, and GPAs matter for internships, 
college admissions, and job applications. In fact, some employers don’t even consider 
applicants who have lower than a certain GPA, and​ some Texas colleges​ automatically admit 
students who are in the top 10% of their high school class, a status usually determined by 
GPA. 

Like it or not, a student with a 2.5 GPA who retains everything from their classes is less likely 
to get into Yale than a student with a 4.0 who throws away all their papers the minute high 
school ends. 

HOW MOM AND DAD FACTOR IN 

Because so much depends upon high school grades, parents end up caring about them a lot 
too, which only increases the stakes for students. 

Many parents, particularly in high-achieving, high-pressure schools, go directly to teachers​ ​to 

try to get their children’s grades raised​, and one 2014​ ​survey​ found that 80% of kids thought 
that their parents cared more about their achievement than their happiness or altruism.​ ​Some 
school districts​ have even had to restrict the number of times per week that parents are 
allowed to access their children’s grades online. 

Perhaps because their parents value good grades so highly, many students use their grades 
as a barometer of their intelligence. As Inside Higher Ed​ explains​, students often focus on “the 
gap between their outcomes, in the form of grades, and their input, in the form of effort.” A 
student with high outcomes and low input is assumed to be more intelligent, hence students 
bragging about not studying for quizzes or the SAT. 
This creates a problem: “When the goal is to be smart, the formula is reduced to maximizing 
grades while minimizing effort,” whereas “when the goal is to learn, the formula is about 
maximizing learning while optimizing effort.” 

SENSE OF SELF WORTH 

Even when they don’t try to minimize their academic effort, many students base their sense of 
self on academic achievement, often in the form of grades. 

A​ 2002 psychology study​ found that ​over 80% of college freshmen based their self-worth 
on academic competence—more than family support, appearance, or any other single 
factor.​ This finding is worrying because basing self-worth on external sources is correlated 
with “more stress, anger, academic problems, [and] relationship conflicts” as well as “drug and 
alcohol use and symptoms of eating disorders.” In light of this information, ​it’s no wonder 
students act like getting a poor score on an essay is a personal attack—to them, it is. 

However, the problems with students’ focus on grades don’t end with self-esteem. Fixating on 
grades is part of a larger issue: the source for academic motivation. 

Intrinsic motivation, sometimes called​ inward motivational orientation​, is motivation that is 
“self-[centered] in a positive way,” in that someone’s own “desire to learn from the task has 
the highest priority.” Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, relies entirely on the outside 
world for incentives, such as praise and grades, to learn. 

In a broad sense, intrinsic motivation is important because it is linked to​ more excitement​, 
confidence, persistence, creativity, and well-being as well as enhanced performance. In a 
purely educational sense,​ research​ shows that “motivational orientations associated with 
secondary school—and probably actually experienced at that time—are important 
prerequisites for the formation of task value during adulthood.” 
Put in simpler terms, a student’s level of intrinsic or extrinsic motivation is often stable over 
their lifetime; developing an intrinsic motivation at an early age is a good predictor of lifelong 
learning as well as overall wellbeing. 

 
Taken together, all of these studies, surveys, and theories are striking. When students obsess 
about grades, it is not just annoying for teachers or unideal for students; it hurts their mental 
and physical health, limits their ability to think broadly and originally, and affects their 
motivation for learning and working. Since so much of identity formation happens during K-12 
schooling, how students learn to interpret their grades in relation to themselves really 
matters-- both in the moment and over the years. 
 

Negative Effects of Grades on Students 

In addition to concerns about whether students’ focus on grades is healthy for them 
emotionally, there is also evidence that grades can have a negative effect on academic 
progress. 

Most student evaluations are composed of both​ evaluative feedback​, which “judges student 
work,” and descriptive feedback, “which provides information about how a student can 
become more competent.” ​Many studies have found that while students focus heavily on 
evaluative feedback, descriptive​ ​feedback is much more important for student learning​. 

For example,​ one study​ divided students into three groups: some students got descriptive 
feedback, some got evaluative feedback (grades), and the rest got no feedback. 
The result? “​Providing evaluative feedback​ (in this case, grades) after a task does not appear 
to enhance students’ future performance in problem-solving.” Students who received 
descriptive feedback, on the other hand, performed significantly better on all subsequent 
tasks than students in the other two groups. 

NOT ALL FEEDBACK IS CREATED EQUAL 

In fact, evaluative feedback not only doesn’t help students perform better in the future, it often 
distracts students from absorbing important descriptive feedback in the present. 

One experiment​ found that students who were informed that they would be graded after a 
social studies lesson retained less of a given text than those who were told the lesson would 
be ungraded.​ ​Some education researchers​ have even concluded that grades “depressed 
creativity, fostered fear of failure, and weakened students’ interest.” 

These effects are amplified​ in low achievers who experience “dramatic declines” in academic 
interest upon receiving low scores. In contrast, there have been no measured negative 
consequences of receiving descriptive feedback alone. These results have been replicated 
across studies, regions, and decades. 

Although there are many theories as to why grades produce such a negative effect on 
students, one of the most convincing ideas is​ feedback intervention theory​, which describes 
how receiving feedback leads to changes in attention. 

Ideally, feedback should focus students’ attention on the task at hand and the learning 
required to perform the task more effectively; because of the aforementioned research about 
self-esteem and academic achievement, ​grades focus students’ attention on themselves 
instead, leading to worse academic performances. 

 
How to Prioritize Learning 
CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES 

● Drafts, re-dos, and “evolving assignments” 

● Learning reflections and mindfulness 
● Shifting language and focus from task completion (“do this”) to learning goal, 
outcome, or growth (“this is what you’ll learn) 

Although some of the focus on grades comes from pressures outside the classroom, there are 
many methods that teachers can use to encourage students to reorient their attention to 
learning itself. 

For example,​ one teacher suggests​ giving “​evolving assignments​,” such as papers written in 
installments with descriptive feedback but no grades until the end. This kind of assignment 
shows that learning is never finished, and work can always be improved. Such projects will 
also help prepare students for the outside world in which they might have year-long 
engineering projects or book deals with dozens of drafts. 

Other possible activities​ include learning reflections that encourage students to link current 
assignments to the skills that they will need for their future desired jobs. 

For example, if one student is interested in becoming a biology researcher, they might reflect 
on how their in-class presentation on To Kill a Mockingbird will make them more comfortable 
communicating their scientific findings to a lay audience in the future. This idea is more 
externally oriented than it could be, but the focus is off of grades and onto the benefits that 
skills-based knowledge can yield. 

Lastly, teachers can help to prioritize learning by making small shifts in their diction when 
giving any kind of assignment. Rather than saying, “this is what I need you to do,” teachers 
can say, “This is what this assignment will teach you.” ​After all, learning is about what the 
students gain, not what the teachers want. 

ENCOURAGE INTRINSIC MOTIVATION 

As seen earlier, intrinsic motivation is a major factor in educational success, and although 
some students may be naturally more inclined to have one type of motivation or the other, 
teachers can have a big role in increasing intrinsic motivation in all their students. 

Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching​ suggests​ that intrinsic motivation is facilitated by two factors: 
interest and control. That is, the material has to hold the students’ interest and the students 
must feel that they can exert control over the learning process. 

To increase interest, teachers should display passion about the subject matter themselves; 
dry presentations can discourage even the most motivated of students and compelling 
ones can draw in even the most apathetic. 

There are a number of different cues that can help teachers express interest; Vanderbilt 
recommends​ using cues such as novelty (ex: “This is different than anything we’ve learned so 
far!”), surprise (“Just wait for the chapter we are going to read tomorrow!”), and challenges 
(“Who’s ready to be pushed to the next level?”) to increase interest in subject matter. 

To increase students’ control over their own learning, teachers can also employ student-led 
teaching activities, help students set their own performance goals, and allow students to 
choose their own paper and presentation topics. 

GRADING POLICIES 
Naturally, some of the ways to push the emphasis back on learning involve changing the ways 
we grade and think about grading. 

Despite the research that calls for grades to be abolished altogether, very few schools 
exist that do so, and the reasons why grades were developed in the 19th century remain 
relevant. 

 
One way to keep grading while shifting the emphasis onto learning is to grade based on 
participation and effort. This system​ has been shown​ to increase students’ interest in 
academic improvement. 

Some researchers​ also argue that students will become more self-regulated and 
self-motivated learners if they have more control over the grading process. For example, you 
can provide students with clear rubrics that explain the criteria for each assignment and even 
ask students to use rubrics to assess their own work (here's more on​ ​constructing effective 
rubrics​). 

In addition, many studies call the validity of grades into question because they are often 
influenced by​ ​teacher bias​. Using The Graide Network to implement anonymous grading 
would solve this problem by removing potential biases such as race, gender, class, and 
teacher preference. 

Many researchers​ also suggest that “the time and energy spent on grading has often been 
pinpointed as a key barrier to instructors becoming more innovative in their teaching.” ​The 
Graide Network helps teachers to hurdle that barrier, as teachers who partner with us have 
more time to restructure courses, refine pedagogical choices, create engaging lectures, 
and brainstorm ways to focus student attention on the learning process. 

Lastly, research suggests that one of the best ways to improve student success is to provide 
more descriptive feedback rather than more numerical evaluations. The Graide Network’s 
future educators are trained to do exactly that; we provide students with​ actionable, specific, 
goal-oriented feedback​ that keeps them focused on learning and encourages them to grow 
as intellectuals. 

Despite the flaws with grading, grades are here to stay. Prestigious colleges expect them for 
admissions and scholarship opportunities, and employers view grades as a measure of hard 
work and technical skill.​ ​Good grades are even linked to higher lifetime earning potential​. 

All that said, as​ student stress levels rise​ and​ employers prioritize skills and experience over 
GPA​, it is important that grades do not eclipse learning as the end goal of education. By 
providing our students with high-quality, constructive feedback, we can help them become 
learners with a passion for knowledge that will serve them all their lives.