Detta är den första argumenterade uppsats jag någonsin har skrivit, men eftersom ämnet som jag fick att välja på passade mig bra så tänkte jag att jag skulle lägga upp den här. Som sagt, när ni läser så tänk på att detta är första gången jag skriver en uppsats över huvud taget på universitets nivå!
The Pressure That Comes with Grades are not Acceptable
The school’s aim should be that learning is more relevant than grades. It needs to be a place where you celebrate curiosity and a striving towards a healthy mindset. Currently, it symbolizes stress, low self-esteem and it has become a place where a high mark on a test is valued more than the wellbeing of the student. Now it is time to stop working against the students and look at the reality of the grade system. The problem with evaluations is that students feel stressed, have low self-esteem and have lost their own curiosity as a result of the pressure from the grades.
Firstly, one might think that it is acceptable to feel a bit of stress over a grade, that it makes the student perform better. More accurately, the stress that comes out of reaching a grade is detrimental. Hank Pellissier, a writer on education and brain development, wrote in his article that it is hard for students to master new material and to remember it if they are under constant stress (Pellissier). This is something that happens in schools every day. Students are focused on reaching the criteria for good scores that they are learning it because they must if they want to attend further studies. For them, it is more necessary to get high grades rather than achieving knowledge.
Next, grades give the student low self-esteem and a hard time to believe in themselves. One can argue that when the grades are good, it gives the pupil strength to strive for desirable grades in all subjects. To rebuke that, a student can have excellent results in all the other subjects except one, similarly, the grades can be bad even if the student has done its best. If this is the reality, then it provokes low self-esteem and the student identify themselves with their achievement. If the score is good, then they are a good person who did what they were supposed to do and thrived. Furthermore, if the grades are poorly, they feel like they are bad and did not succeed according to the test.
Lastly, grades show the student that everything they do will be evaluated, that it will be graded. They need to do what the teacher tells them to do if they want an A, so the test becomes more important than what they learn. One could ask, how does one know that a student is learning if they are not being evaluated moreover, graded? That is a good question. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College, answers the question. According to his article “Schools Are Good for Showing Off, Not for Learning”, he discusses that, if they are graded, students will think that schools are about learning results and not about knowledge. He claims that the pupil should learn through enthusiasm, on the contrary to school, when they are forced to learn to be able to get good grades (Gray). When a student knows what they do will be evaluated, they lose their inner curiosity to learn new things and will learn in a superficial way instead.
To conclude, more needs to be done for students in school to succeed in life than what is accomplished with the current grad system. We do not want future co-workers and managers that have been stressed from a young age, have low self-esteem and do not want to work without praise. The society needs to have curious, healthy and confident young people to come out to work-life, moreover, to adult life. To be able to achieve that, the schools need to focus more on learning than on the grades.
SaraIsabella 