The numbers game

Do grades matter? It’s a question that has probably crossed all of our minds at least once (the actual number might be closer to a thousand) throughout our years in grade school, high school, and college. With another term in the books, we often find ourselves asking this question to console ourselves for our low marks or to make us feel better about that classmate who has a term grade point average of 4.0.

Some argue that grades don’t matter, saying that they only reflect how well you’ve memorized facts or familiarized yourself with mathematical methods. You hear about all those people who’ve dropped out of school but still made a name for themselves in the world. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates are the most common examples of successful people whose names are thrown at you when people try to make a case against grades or even finishing school, for that matter.

Despite that, it still holds true that grades do not define who you are. They don’t reflect your personality, how crafty and street smart you are, or even your teamwork and leadership skills, but that doesn’t mean that we should neglect them altogether. If you aren’t one of the few people who are blessed with phenomenal athletic abilities or the one-in-a-billion creativity and ingenuity of a Zuckerberg, Jobs, or Gates, you should take that as a sign to get your act together. Let’s face it, we’re not all cut out to be that genius who can top every exam through natural ability alone, but everyone has the power to give their best effort each and every day.

When I was a high school sophomore, I tried out for our school’s baseball team. Not many were interested in joining and save for a few exceptional players, the rest of the roster had to be filled with whoever was committed enough to attend practice twice a week and a couple of games every weekend. There were a couple of seniors who also attended the tryouts and from the way that they moved, they obviously had no business being on the field. During a water break, one of them was gasping for air and said, “I need this for my college application, man!” but then another shot back, “You know what’s gonna help your college application? Fix your grades!” That brief exchange left its mark on me and almost seven years after it happened, I would have to agree, based on experience and the stories that I’ve heard, that it’s all about the grades, whether it be applying for college or trying to find a good job.

The harsh reality is that these numbers known as grades are probably the most reliable tool for prospective employers to measure our abilities or lack thereof. In a labor economics elective that I took this past term, we discussed how grades are used as a signal of one’s potential productivity to a firm. It may not be the perfect method to do so, but with the tens of thousands of fresh graduates looking for jobs, it is the best mix of convenience and effectiveness available.

You can think of grades as the specs of a new smartphone that you’re about to buy. You can’t fully capture the experience of using it by just looking at the screen’s pixels, the promised battery life, and the other numbers at the back of the box, but you can get an almost accurate idea of what you can expect. Unfortunately, the same goes for students and grades, and that’s enough to convince me that they do matter.

The system, like any other, has its flaws and loopholes. Grades can never quantify how much you’ve learned from a class. Some of the classes from which I’ve learned the most from ended with a 1.0 or 1.5, while I’ve received 4.0s in classes that I learned absolutely nothing from. Many argue that students should receive passing or failing marks instead of grades which range according to performance, but that will only encourage some to get by while it will offer no reward or compensation for those who go the extra mile to excel. If we want to change this system, we have to first find a way to put ourselves in a position to do so, and we can’t do that as dropouts working at a fast food chain.

The debate on whether grades matter will go on for many years to come, but in the meantime, we have to grasp their importance. However, despite all the hoopla surrounding grades, what we learn inside the classroom should still be the most important takeaway from our classes. That’s what we’ll take with us in the long run beyond the walls of the University and into what we like to call “The Real World”. Grades will forever be numbers and will never properly reflect on what we’ve learned, but once we receive our diplomas and start looking for work, they might be the only number that we can count on to save us from unemployment, and for that reason alone, yes they do matter.