First day of every course I teach, before we talk about software or deadlines or what the final project looks like, I say the same thing, and I say it like I mean it because I do. I don’t give a damn about your grades. I care about you learning. And every semester there’s this moment, you can actually see it, where half the room relaxes and the other half doesn’t believe me yet, because nobody has ever said that to them before, and they’ve spent their whole academic lives being told the opposite, that the number is the thing, that the letter is what matters, that if you don’t hit the mark you’ve somehow failed at something fundamental.
But here’s what I know after doing this for a quarter century, and it’s something the system doesn’t want to talk about. A student who walks into my classroom knowing nothing about design, who struggles with every assignment, who asks questions that feel basic and pushes through frustration and shows up even when the work isn’t clicking, and finishes the semester with a C, that student got educated. That student grew. That’s what the tuition was for. And then there’s the student who took a design class in high school, maybe played around in Photoshop since middle school, walks in already knowing half the material, coasts through every assignment without breaking a sweat, and pulls an A. That student got credentialed. And we treat those two outcomes as though the A is obviously better, but they are not the same thing, not even close, and the fact that we keep confusing them is one of the biggest problems in education.
You know, I caught myself doing the same thing once, and it’s embarrassing enough that I should probably tell you about it. In grad school I got a 99.6 on one assignment and a 99.4 on another, and I wanted to argue both of them. I was convinced I was right and the professor was wrong, and I could lay out my reasoning in detail, and I spent real time and energy on those fractions of a point. I was still talking about it fifteen years later, which tells you everything you need to know about what grades do to your brain. They get in there and they stay, and they turn you into someone who argues about tenths of a point instead of asking whether the work itself taught you anything. And so now when I tell the story I finish it the same way every time. Let it go. It doesn’t matter. And that’s the truth of the matter.
I learned something about this at military school that I still use, and I still teach. There was a course they made us take the first six weeks, a “how to study” thing that most of us probably rolled our eyes at, but it planted something. When you’re worried about a grade, your adrenaline spikes, your blood vessels contract, less oxygen gets to your brain, and the thing you knew when you walked into the room suddenly disappears the moment you need it. You studied it. You understood it. And then the fear ate it. So I started wearing a put-across on my wrist, just a small thing, and before every test I’d rub it and say to myself, help me remember what I know, and help me guess really well at the rest. That’s it. Nothing magic. Just a way of telling my own nervous system to calm down, because at that point there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t change what I knew. I couldn’t change what was on the test. The only variable left was the stress level. My test average jumped between ten and thirteen points after I started doing that, and I tell my students the same thing now, with my own version of the line from Animal House. It just doesn’t matter.
And here’s what I do that drives some students crazy at first, though they usually come around. When I hand back assignments, I withhold the numeric grade for a week. They get written feedback only, detailed notes about what’s working and what needs attention and where the thinking could go deeper, but no number. No letter. And you should see the reaction. Some of them genuinely don’t know what to do with feedback that isn’t attached to a score. They’ve been trained to glance at the number and move on, and when the number isn’t there, they actually have to read the words, and something shifts. They start engaging with the substance of what I’m telling them instead of translating everything into a calculation about their GPA. The ones who ask me, “what do I need to make an A?” are asking the wrong question, and I tell them that, gently but directly. The right question is “what do I need to learn?” and those two questions lead to very different places.
You know what employers have never once called me to ask? Whether a student graduated with a 4.0 or a 3.8. Not once in twenty-five years. They want to see the portfolio. They want to know if this person can produce results for clients, if they show up on time, if they keep their promises, if they work well with a team, if they actually research and think or if they take shortcuts and hope nobody notices. Grades are what teachers sent home to parents when you were a small child. Grades are what graduate schools use to screen applicants because they can’t actually get to know each person. But in the real professional world, in the rooms where the work happens, they’re mostly theater.
And so I keep saying it, first day of every course, same words, same conviction. I don’t care about your grades. I care about you learning. And some of them believe me right away, and some of them take a few weeks, and some of them don’t really get it until they’re three years into a career and realize nobody ever asked them about their GPA, and they think back to that first day and it finally clicks. That’s fine. The timing doesn’t have to be mine. It just has to land eventually.
