<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2Ds9gH_1H1gzPQH00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2Ds9gH_1H1gzPQH00" width="900" height="1200" ><figcaption>Addison Jackson</figcaption></figure>In light of receiving feedback on some of my first major assignments, I have decided that it would be best for Dickinson College and all other higher education institutions to eliminate grades. Turning learning into a spreadsheet of numbers and percentages creates an absurd standard with detrimental side effects that encourages completion over authentic education. Recently, the University of Michigan announced a pilot program replacing traditional letter grades with a Pass or No Credit system for first-year students in their first semester of college. Since then, the plan to eliminate percentage grades has paused due to intense backlash and public debate that risked portraying freshmen as unprepared or pampered (Nietzel, 2026). However, I would welcome it if the University of Michigan resumed its plan and other colleges joined in its efforts. Grades have turned students into emotional extortionists. They are now more capable of maintaining intense eye contact with their professors during office hours while allowing a calculated tear to fall down their cheek in hopes of achieving a better grade than they are proficient at actually doing the research paper they want curved. A GPA no longer measures intelligence, only how much sympathy a single, tactical lip quiver can produce. Letter and percentage grades also turn a room of sweet, debt-ridden young adults into bloodthirsty saboteurs. Under a curved grading system, your classmates are no longer the peers you met on the first day of school; they are obstacles to be destroyed. Now, instead of wanting to have lunch with the girl you sat next to two months ago, you begin actively praying for her to contract the deadly flu right before the midterm so the class average drops. Let us not forget extracurricular bribery: one cannot underestimate the end-of-semester scramble. By May, students who have yet to crack the spine on their courses’ required readings are offering to wash their professor’s car, organize a filing cabinet or bring in three boxes of Kleenex for a 1% bump on their final grade. This is not education; it’s negotiation. Students will refuse to read a twelve-page paper for class, yet as soon as the professor offers a slight grade bump, those same students will willingly offer to get hit by a moving vehicle if it means raising their grade by one percentage point. Bear in mind that those students will also sit in their beds at the crack of dawn, obsessively typing numbers into a GPA calculator, trying to figure out if they can still go to medical school if they fake their own death, change their name and relocate to a foreign country. Beyond that, it is important to highlight that wanting to receive good grades has turned students into high-level, black-market mob bosses. They aren’t learning multivariable calculus or the history of foreign policy, they’re learning how to trade a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos or a free ride to Target for someone else’s homework answers. Have we also forgotten that we’re already in college? Your transcript doesn’t matter anymore; your GPA will mean less than the dust on the fan of your future employer’s office. No one has ever stopped a surgeon mid-appendectomy to ask them what their grade was in biology during their freshman year. If the appendix comes out and the patient doesn’t bleed to death, does it really matter that you forgot to turn in your English essay by the due date and failed a class? This is not a plea for mercy from my professors, this is a call to action. Students need to start burning their papers and smashing Scantrons. We need to step into a brave new world where a percentage does not define us and an alphabet soup on paper does not determine our future. </div></body>

Block Source: thedickinsonian.com

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In light of receiving feedback on some of my first major assignments, I have decided that it would be best for Dickinson College and all other higher education institutions to eliminate grades. Turning learning into a spreadsheet of numbers and percentages creates an absurd standard with detrimental side effects that encourages completion over authentic education.

Rest in peace report cards: why grades should be eliminated

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In light of receiving feedback on some of my first major assignments, I have decided that it would be best for Dickinson College and all other higher educa

Rest in peace report cards: why grades should be eliminated

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