A Proposal to Abolish Grading

Poutre, Emily Candice

Period 4 AP English

November 24 2012

"A Proposal to Abolish Grading"

Argumentative Essay

Doing everything you possibly can and coming up short is a pain that everybody has endured at least once or twice in their lives. For most kids and teenagers that pain is felt when day in and day out they give it all they got in school only to open up their report cards and see D's and F's. Few, if any, will see it as motivation to try and do better while the rest will be shattered by it and hang their heads. After all, what doesn't make you breaks you. A low grade is always tough especially if the kid is honestly giving it all they got. Sometimes a student cannot reach the teachers expectations but why should they be punished for that ? That is what's wrong with grading systems, it shouldn't be about just the letter grade but how the individual students improved at their own level. Grading will only lead to cheating, plagiarism, and failure to encode and store the information they are learning.

In every class you have your A students, B students, C students, and the 'Failure' students but to label them like that isn't always right. The A and B students aren't always the smartest of the class, some are just able to memorize what they had to in order to pass, where's the learning or glory in that? Only doing it for the grade will get our students nowhere, it is not knowledge they're learning if they are cheating or simply memorizing the material to get the "A". Eliminate the payoff, the "A", and see if the same kids will continue to be at the top, probably not. Surprisingly the C students and even some of the F students will walk away with the most at the end of the year and remember what they learned for a very long time. Isn't that what Education is about, to better yourself at your own level? Why should the teacher have the power to decide who passes or not? If a high school junior was writing at a fifth grade level and got it up to a 10th grade level in that one year is he not passing in his own way? But the teacher not passing him because he didn't reach her standards breaks a kid and can bring down his enthusiasm to further learn. Besides, who's to say the people who did reach her standards did it in a proper manner.

What wouldn't people do if promised a million dollars? Well it's the same in school, a student will do anything for the high grade. Whether it's cheat on a test, plagiarize on an essay, or pay someone off to do their homework. In the end it'd just be better off to eliminate grades