Student grading has long been an honored code of our schools. Schools mainly use it to quantify student understanding for use as an aid for student education; students can reflect on what aspects they understand after testing and hopefully learn what they hadn’t understood. However, do grades work accurately towards helping students learn?

Any respected education system places its responsibility at the education of students. We all go to school to be educated for a more successful life. However, a truly effective education often requires careful monitoring of each student and their progressive learning in a class. If a teacher can understand how a student learns and in what direction their progression of understanding in the class goes, then education can be shifted in respect to this and learning and ultimately understanding can be improved. That is, the best way for students to learn is for their educators to understand their learning structure and adapt it based on such.

The grading system lacks the necessary qualities to support an effective learning experience. The   current grading system at its best follows the understanding of students based on recorded information through testing. It only looks at the end result of student learning, or understanding, and fails to examine the whole adaptive curve that is student learning. A similar type of examination can be found mathematically in a Cartesian graph when a function draws a curve. We can easily place a point on the curve to represent its coordinates at a given time, but it ultimately can’t track in which direction the curve is going; it only looks at a specific section of the function. The only way to truly understand where the function is going is to analyze the function itself and its possibilities, not the points it spits up on a graph.

The best way to understand something is to examine its methods, not the often influenced product that is made based on such. Without being able to track the learning of students, teachers at school at best have only a crude look at what is going on inside of a student and can only judge them based on a quantitative look at their understanding. This severely hampers teachers’ abilities to help students learn because of this. Effective education is a growing and adapting experience: we should never checkpoint it with quantitative testing, but rather understand the larger picture of student learning and adapt education to it. This is why grading is better removed: a teacher’s focus should be placed on understanding the students’ learning, not what they produce in grades.