Your grades, in the greater scheme of life, are not everything

“How are you doing in your classes?” “Are you doing well?” “What is your grade?” “Is it a good grade?”

These questions are not only excessively annoying, but rather irrelevant. Hear me out.

While it makes sense to delve into academics and have high ambitions, say this sentence out loud: “I got an A.” “A” what? You took the letter of the alphabet and made it your own? “I got a B, C, D, X, Y, Z…” I’m glad you know the alphabet. Do I need to keep going? What is a grade? Where did it come from? How is a letter able to accurately and sufficiently sum up one’s attributes and talents? It’s actually kind of ridiculous how much effort people put in order to have the best possible mark on a taunting computer screen.

You are not a letter. You are not a number on a page or a series of check marks or stars. You are worth so much more than a pompous TA lazily marking off points on an essay due to his or her own unreasonably picky standards. You are worth more than a GPA range, a percentile, or a number out of one hundred. You are a human being. You are a student. You are intelligent and have a lot to offer the world in a way that cannot be defined by letters or numbers alone.

In this society, grades are indisputably one of the driving factors of an education. While there is truth to what a “good” grade entails, there is also a lot of hype. For instance, an A on an essay can likely mean that the writer took a lot of time and effort to ensure that ample research, fact-checking, sources, and creativity were applied. That is fantastic. That shows dedication and a hard work ethic. The A was earned.

But there is a second scenario.

In scenario two, the person writes an essay shortly before the midnight deadline. The essay is frantically written, inadequately prepared, and done in a frenzy. Grade: A. The person writes another paper and takes time to prepare it and receives a B. The point is that grades are based on luck or chance a lot of the time, or, apparently, how the instructor is feeling at a given moment.

There is also the issue that a letter or number grade is uninformative. Frequently, an instructor will not even give back a test, for example, after it was taken and the student spends days or even weeks stressing about the result, only to receive an impersonal score on Learn@UW. This is a highly problematic occurrence. How is the student supposed to know what he or she did wrong without any form of adequate feedback? How is getting a C, for example, any way informative or offering a learning experience? It is not. It only results in more anxiety and confusion, especially if the test was not even given back and all the student has to rely on is the “C” and percentage in the exams column.

With final exams approaching and stress levels ranging at their highest, I encourage you to take your exams and other projects seriously. Do care about school. Do put your heart and soul into academic work and find courses that you are passionate about. Put in the work.

But do not focus on the grade alone. As cheesy as this sounds, focus on learning. Focus on doing the best you can to ensure a positive current academic state, as well as future prospects in all aspects. Know when to slow down and pause. In a perfect world, grades would not exist, or at least not in the way that they do now. Instead, thorough feedback and kindheartedness would exist. A letter grade would not be the final mark on one’s transcript. Instead, a transcript could consist of comments from professors and peers and a reflection of one’s academic journey with comments such as “very good, because…” or “this student struggled with this aspect but excelled in X”.

This world does not exist, unfortunately, but it is my hope that someday it will. Until then, remember that your health is the ultimate priority.   Remember that you are valuable and have a lot to contribute both inter, as well as intrapersonally. Focus on the phenomenal education you are receiving, but do not permit a letter or number define who you are personally or professionally.