Prompt: Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma-anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
I’m Chinese. That means I come from a culture of expectations that I get good grades, that I go to a good college, that I contribute to. Yet the Asian culture places too much emphasis on grades, treating them as a measure of intellect, even worth as an individual, and those inaccurate beliefs are reinforced in out education system. While this may be true to an extent, this is fallacious reasoning-grades measure each unique student in a standardized way, mislabeling students and telling them what they are and can do. While this doesn’t personally apply to me as an individual, my generation and those to come are becoming machines on an assembly line, pieced together to think the same, to do the same, to be the same.
Students with low grades will be failures, and stellar students will be successful-these mislabels distort self-confidence and motivation; the wrongs that must be addressed in the education system. What students lack in brute knowledge they can make up for in creativity or charisma; the most successful students are those with the curiosity and drive to experience and overcome failure. Labeling creates expectations, which transforms into reality through a downward spiral of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
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By taking away the superiority or inferiority associated with grades, students are more likely to apply themselves and pursue genuine knowledge. Although grades are meant to incentivize learning, they have become the sole purpose for learning a detrimental aspect of the predominant education system students are exposed to. For that matter, grading needs to have less significance, and learning more.
Teachers are not exempt from the corruption of the system. They are incentivized to perpetuate the cycle of grade prejudice through the association between their paycheck and their students’ grades and scores on standardized exams.
My physics teacher told the class at the beginning of the year: “No student should ever come out of a class saying it was a waste of their time and they didn’t learn anything,” and isn’t this the code that all teachers should live by? Students should be defined by their achievements, their applications of whatever knowledge they gain in school, because that’s true mastery. A solution is already in progress, with AP exams and standardized tests changing to become more application-based, and we must persist in revolutionizing our education system. The value of learning is up to the individual, and we must work to dispel the belief that straight-A students are the ones who win Nobel prizes. We do this because no child should be valued based on a specific skill they may or may not have. It’s what they have that counts.
