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Argumentative Essay: Should Students Abolish Grades?

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As society moves into the twenty-first century, it must closely assess its system of performing things. Where better to start looking than current students at Zurich International School (ZIS)? Students fear failure and bad grades. This makes students have less grit and diminishes the quality of students’ thinking, all of which make learning more harder. A straightforward solution will be to eliminate grades altogether. ZIS should abolish grades because it will allow students to learn more without the stress of grades,make school more fair, and increase the reliability and accuracy of giving meaningful feedback . Without grades, students will have less stress upon them from their parents and teachers. Grades cause stress on students making …show more content…

An “Exceeding Expectations” does not tell any information about what they can do, what she understands, where they need help, and how they can improve next time. This shows that grades are not reliable to give meaningful information to a student. A study done by Kirschenbaum shows that a test or an assignment may even be given two different grades by a single teacher who reads it at two different times (Kirschenbaum,1971). In short grades show a fake precision. The reason why teachers evaluate students is to give them good meaningful feedback that allows students to learn more and make them better after. Grades are an inadequate means of achieving that because they are not helping students to internalize and work toward meeting high standards, but that is most likely to happen when they “experience success and failure not as reward and punishment, but as information” (Bruner 1961, p. 26). Grades also do not define intelligence, it just defines how well a person memorizes facts, and how good one person is at school. Plus schools are very specific on how they expect you to answer and do not measure one's vast intelligence. ““Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.” - Edward de Bono”(Telegraph). This shows how creativity is ignored in favour of expected

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Sherry’s own son, who always got by in school, was told by one of his teachers that he could either do his work or fail the class. The threat of failure motivated him to learn. She sees the resentment those students that were passed through school have for the system because as adults they value the education they threw away as teens. Sherry argues that teachers and parents must relook at the merit of failing because it can be a positive teaching

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In Alfie Kohn’s essay, the argument of grade expectations being too overvalued rests on a chain of assumptions, but can be argued. Alfie Kohn’s essay portrays that he wants students to find a variety of different purposes in school, and questions the idea of grades being too centralized. In detail, Alfie Kohn explains how students go to school not for the right reasons, but for the wrong reasons instead. For example, the author writes, “They’d scan the catalogue for college courses that promised easy A’s, sign up for new extracurricular-activities to round out their resumes, and react with gratitude when a professor told them exactly what they would have to know for the exam so they could ignore everything else” (para. 8).

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In “How Grading Reform Changed Our School,” author Jeffery Erickson, the assistant principal of Minnetonka High School in Minnesota, discusses why and how he and his colleagues changed the way students received their grades. Erickson’s main argument in his essay is, “What should go into a grade?” His answer to this is that a student’s grade is solely reflected based on what a student knows and his or her ability to perform. Erickson opens up his essay by giving a scenario from a personal experience of when his daughter took swimming lessons. It was a challenge for his daughter to master the class, but in the end she finally passed on the last day.

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Kohn believes grading is a harmful thing for students because it is more of a game with competition. He views grading as something that does not lead to improvements in performance but holds students back from doing their best. He states, “A school’s ultimate mission, apparently, is not to help everyone learn but to rig the game so that there will always be losers” (Kohn 2). Kohn relates school and grading to a game. A game where students begin to try to outdo one another rather than focusing on their academics.

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First high achieving students grades are what keep them focused and motivated in school. On the other end of the spectrum are students who simply do not have the willpower or drive to earn high marks in school. There are students who focus who too much on grades, and by doing this end up memorizing the material being taught and not absorbing. They are like little robots spouting facts and information, but not being able to truly comprehend its meaning.

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They lack the indication of students’ knowledge as they are only a depiction of their effort. Absences, laziness, and disengagements are just a few of the factors of why grades are a poor representation of students’ intellectual capacity. While others may argue that grades motivate them, it is not genuinely correct since grades encourage

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