Many people believe that our performance in high school will dictate how the rest of our lives will go: if you get bad grades you will not have a job and will struggle. If you get good grades you will go to a good college and get a well paying job. But this is not necessarily true because there are so many different paths that people can take in life. Society also makes it seem like grades reflect our knowledge, but do they really show our intelligence as a whole and how students will succeed? The grade someone gets on a test or assignment does not always reflect how well a person knows the material. People could be bad at test taking and get anxiety, or the assessment questions could even be written in a way that is difficult to understand. Despite their importance, grades do not accurately reflect our knowledge.
When it comes to quizzes or tests, anxiety is something that affects many people. Whether it hits you the night before, the class before, or mid test, anxiety can really change how you take a test or quiz. Even if you have spent time studying and reviewing, getting caught up in the nerves of a test can cause someone to forget everything they learned. Some of these grades do not exhibit how much you actually know about the topic. For instance, in an experiment conducted by Walpole High School students, results showed that in some classes kids felt more confident in their grades and were in the low Bs. Meanwhile, in a few classes where students reported they did not know what was going on, their grades were As. These results are direct examples of how grades do not accurately represent a student’s knowledge.
Additionally, the way an assignment is formatted could be the reason why students perform poorly and receive bad grades. If the instructions or the questions are written in a confusing way, students may complete the assignment incorrectly. Test and quiz questions may also use strong vocabulary that makes it much more difficult to comprehend what it is asking for. The way questions are worded have a massive effect on how correct students respond to it.
Standardized tests are also an aspect of school and grades that are extremely unfair for students. Kids with special needs especially have trouble with assessment like the MCAS. Before, when MCAS was a graduation requirement, any student who failed would not have the ability to receive a diploma. This was also tremendously unfair for any student that had test taking struggles, anxiety or even ADHD.
A bad grade does not define who someone is and most certainly does not accurately reflect how much that person knows in the subject. A person could not know anything and completely guess on something but still receive a good grade. Meanwhile, another person could study really hard and know the topic pretty well but still fail or get a poor grade. Overall, grades do not decide our futures for us or dictate our knowledge.
