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Let me tell you something I’m not proud of. I took two graduate courses through the University of Florida, online, and in the first one the professor took points away for something I was right about, and I still think about it. I still know the number. It was 98.4, or maybe 99.4, and I will argue that deduction to this day because I was right and she was wrong and I should have had 100. Not a 99.6, not a 98.6, a 100. Then it happened again in the second course. Exactly the same situation, a deduction I’ll fight forever, another fraction below perfect, and here’s the thing that kills me, I knew at the time, standing right there in that disagreement, that the number didn’t matter. I was literally in the middle of building curriculum to teach students that grades are not the point, and I could not let go of 1.4 points on a graduate transcript that no one will ever look at again. That is the irony I live in. That is the water I swim in and can’t see most days.
I grew up with a very clear set of rules about grades. A is acceptable. B is bad. C is crummy. D, don’t bother coming home. I’m not joking, that was the operating system, and it ran deep enough that if the work wasn’t going to be A-level, I didn’t turn it in. There’s a Spanish notebook from my sophomore year in high school that ended up on the roof of the school building, and I put it there, because whatever was in it wasn’t good enough to hand to the teacher and I didn’t want to face that. I passed several courses in my life by exactly one point, because I’d calculated the minimum I needed on the final exam to survive and I executed precisely that. You know, that’s not stupidity, that’s a different kind of perfectionism, the kind where you’d rather game the floor than risk falling short of the ceiling.
And that pattern never fully left. My curriculum work right now is ten months overdue. Ten months. People have been waiting, and I haven’t delivered, and when I do finally turn it in, the people who receive it call it groundbreaking, and I believe them, and that almost makes it worse because the gap between what I can produce and when I will release it has cost me my entire life in ways I’m still adding up. I’m standing in front of students asking them to let go of the thing I cannot let go of myself. That’s the confession. That’s the whole confession.
So when I tell you that the student who walks into my class with no background and claws their way from zero to a C learned more than the student who coasted on four years of prior experience to an A, I need you to understand that I’m not saying that from some comfortable philosophical distance. I’m saying it from inside the problem, from inside the grip of the very measurement system I’m critiquing, and I’m saying it because I’ve watched it happen enough times to know it’s true even when I can’t fully live it myself.
Here’s what grades actually measure. They measure how much relevant knowledge you arrived with, plus how much you retained, divided by how well you perform under the specific conditions of that particular assessment. That’s it. They don’t measure growth. They don’t measure effort. They don’t measure what you started with versus where you ended up. A student who comes in with ten years of design software experience and a solid foundation in visual principles and gets an A in my intro course has demonstrated that they knew things before the course began. That’s real, and I’m not taking it from them, but let’s be honest about what it proves. Now take a student who comes in never having touched design software, who fails the first project badly, who comes to office hours, who fails the second one less badly, who comes back again, who by the end of the semester is producing work that is genuinely, measurably better than what they walked in with, and who ends with a C. Tell me who learned more in my classroom. Tell me who the course actually changed.
I went through a long period where I would give feedback on projects but not assign the numerical grade for at least a week after the due date. I’d look at the work, I knew what the number was, I could have typed it in ten seconds, and I sat on it deliberately. Just the number. The feedback was immediate, specific, detailed, here’s what’s working, here’s what isn’t, here’s what needs to happen next. But the number? I held it. Because I’d watched too many students open their feedback, scroll past everything I wrote, find the number, and close the document. The number became the whole conversation and everything else disappeared. And I kept thinking about the actual working world, you know, because no employer has ever called me and asked about a student’s GPA. Not once in 25 years. They ask me: does she show up? Can he take direction? Is she going to fall apart the first time a client says it’s not good enough? Because that’s the conversation in the real world, not a score, a judgment and a direction. It’s not good enough, change this, go back and dig into that. Can you work with that? Can you hear it without shutting down? That’s what employers are hiring for and grades don’t test it at all.
The measurement system wasn’t designed for any of this. It was designed for institutional efficiency, for sorting large numbers of students into categories that could be tracked and reported and compared across classrooms and campuses and years. It does that job adequately. But somewhere along the way we confused the instrument for the thing itself, and now we have students who are optimizing for grades instead of learning, which makes perfect sense because that’s what the system rewards, and we’re surprised when they arrive in the workforce knowing how to perform assessment without knowing how to actually do the work. You build what you measure. You get what you reward. And we built a system that rewards the appearance of mastery and then we wonder why people perform for us instead of growing with us.
I’m not telling you grades don’t matter. They matter for scholarships and grad school applications and parents and all kinds of real things. I’m telling you they don’t measure what we pretend they measure, and if you’re a student reading this, the C you earned by actually growing is more valuable in here, in the part of you that will do the work for the next forty years, than the A you earned by already knowing. You know that. You felt the difference when you were in it. The question is whether you let the number tell you a story about yourself that isn’t true.
My Spanish notebook is still on that roof somewhere, probably. Thirty-something years of rain and sun. The teacher I argued with over 1.4 points probably doesn’t remember me. And my curriculum, when I finally release it, will be worth the wait, but I’ll never get back the ten months, and I knew that going in, and I still couldn’t move. The thing that holds us isn’t stupidity or laziness. It’s the story the measurement told us about what we’re allowed to be.
Let go of it a little earlier than I did.
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This post is part of the “What I Tell Students” series.
