Jerry Farber Grading System

The Grading System: Completely Necessary

Grades are an important part of the school system. Grades set the extraordinary students apart from the ordinary ones. In Jerry Farber’s essay, “A Young Person’s Guide to the Grading System,” he argues that grades are the only motivation students have in school. Farber even calls it “phony motivation.” He argues that students do not actually learn anything. Farber also argues that I disagree with Farber’s viewpoint on the grading system and the effect on students. In Farber’s essay, he argues that the school grading system should be abolished. Farber argues that students do not retain everything. They only retain the information until the final exam than it is forgotten. He said, “What we get on our final is all-important; what we retain after the final is irrelevant.” He is saying that what we remember after the final is not important to our everyday life. Farber talks about the student’s drive is centered around pleasing the teachers. The students goal is to get the teacher’s approval. He says that this creates a “phony motivation.” He says that students have been offered to phony motivations for so long that they have become insensitive to real motivations. He compares it to sleeping pill addicts who need the artificial inducement to sleep. He continues to talk about how students think they need the grades to

Farber believes that the grades create phony motivation and students only want to please the teachers. According to Farber, students only retain the material until they are graded on it. No longer having a grading system would leave students having no drive in school. Schools would no longer have a basic form of ranking the students and see how well they are doing. Students would no longer want to see the point in striving to be the best when everyone is ranked the same. Getting rid of grades would ruin the school systems and nobody would learn at