I can hardly believe it: last
week marked the 10-year anniversary of my becoming a faculty member at Wellesley
College. Over the last decade, I’ve
coached countless students through health crises, anxiety over recruiting for
jobs, striking the right school-life balance, and struggling over seemingly
impossible problem set questions. But no
concern looms larger for Wellesley college students than their angst over
grades.
Grade anxiety isn’t just a
Wellesley thing, of course. Yet the extreme extent to which grades define student
experience at Wellesley has always bothered me, and never more so than now.
Only at Wellesley would a student show up in her professor’s office after an exam not
to argue about her grade, but rather to apologize for disappointing the professor.
Oftentimes that “bad” grade is a B+! More importantly, it seems
like this self-defined “bad” grade is viewed as more than just academic
weakness. Students see it as a failure in life in general – a profoundly
disturbing conclusion.
I hold introductory office meetings
with every single student enrolled in my course that semester to welcome them,
chat about life, econ, registration, and to answer questions. This semester, a few students asked me how they can
achieve “success” in my behavioral economics course. It was pretty clear they were asking what they need to do to get an A.
The question is a trigger.
I teach students how to make better decisions in everyday life: how to
negotiate, how to not fall for marketing tricks, how to use
commitment devices to improve planning for the future. Learning these skills
may not necessarily translate into an A in the class (it might, but that’s not
the point). However, it would mean success regardless of the grade.
As much as students are
conditioned to focus all attention on grades, they are at the same time not good at inferring
information from them. The thinking
that an A or a B+ is universal is flawed.
For example, a B+ in a course
where the average in a B is an excellent outcome. This B+ is a success by any standard, and a
transcript with B+s like this one would be viewed as highly competitive on the
job market. On the other hand, an A in a course where all students get an A is not
necessarily a “success”. First of all, the A is then just the average,
so it’s actually not that good of an outcome. That A is also a poor signal of
ability. It’s impossible to tell how well you do when everyone gets the same
grade. Still, the call of that perfect
GPA tempts some students to go for the meaningless A. (Thank you, high school and parental pressure!)
This year, I wish for my
students to redefine “success.” Working
hard, challenging yourself, and learning as much as you can is success even if
it doesn’t result in an A (or even a B+!). While students might think that high
GPA guarantees a good job, that’s not the case.
Someone with a relatively low GPA in a subject she loves shows that she
has challenged herself, persevered, and followed her heart. Employers want to see grit and passion, not
someone on a path of least resistance with a perfect transcript in hand.
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| Welcoming students into my office for good conversation |
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