A Young Person's Guide To The Grading System Analysis

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Mostly, everyone can relate to either themselves being in school or their child, friend or relative being in school and studying profusely in an attempt to get a passing grade on an assignment or test. Fast-forward to today; days, months or maybe years later, many people are questioning whether they actually learned the material or simply memorized it for that particular assignment or test. Grades focus our attention on the task at hand. What we retain after that task is irrelevant. Many of us understand that academic success is something mostly measured in grade points and not in knowledge. Still and yet we remain convinced that we should be graded in order to learn. The essay, “A Young Person’s Guide to the Grading System”, written by Jerry Farber, highlights some very thought-provoking points about learning and what is perceived as learning. Learning happens when a person wants to know. Just because someone receives a passing grade on a subject, does that mean the individual has learned that subject? Everything that people have learned, was it in school? Were they graded on it (Farber, 2012)? Could you imagine that? Although, many people believe grades are needed for …show more content…
They believe that grades motivate students to work harder and promote self-discipline. Although grades might motivate students to compete with each other, should one assume grades motivate students to learn? As a general matter, we know that rewards and punishments can change one’s performance. So there is some accuracy to the motivational aspect of this argument that seems to make it irrefutable (Schwartz & Sharpe, 2011). However, outside of school type settings, no-one gets graded for learning. Society is not graded when learning to walk and talk. Nor are they graded when learning to ride a bike or drive a car, and yet they still learn these things (Farber, 2012). According to Schwartz and