Do Grades Really Portray Future Salaries?

During this previous school year, I had the opportunity to take a sociology course at my local community college as part of my junior year of high school. The class reminded me of how important grades are perceived by students and their parents. Since attending an unconventional school for the past four years, I have lost track of how much concern there is around grades. I liked my professor who taught the course, as he was a nice and approachable guy, and I asked him, “Why do you think grades exist?” His answer was simple: “Because they teach you about how to earn your future salaries.” This makes sense on a basic level. We work harder, and we earn more. This concept works for grading and salaries, making it a compelling argument. However, when pondering his response a bit longer, I recognized there were a few problems with his and many others’ logic.

1. Grades are a “made-up” concept; salaries are not.
   
   Imagine if you started getting paid with Monopoly board game money. This might be a big assumption, but I don’t think you would be thrilled. That’s because it doesn’t hold the same value as actual currency does. There is a big difference between a twenty-dollar bill in Monopoly money and a twenty-dollar bill in USD. Money is a medium of exchange; it is a good we can use to trade goods and services. On the contrary, grades are an artificial measuring system. Teachers and standards decide what one's grade is. A student couldn’t leave their current school’s given GPA without carrying the weight of their GPA with them, which does affect their future.

2. You can get a higher salary if you work harder, but you can’t always get a higher grade.
   
   Grades are capped. If I get 100% on my geometry test, I don’t need to learn more; there isn’t an incentive. But the truth is… I don’t know 100% about geometry, and you couldn’t even say I know 100% about the specific skill I was learning because I can always learn how it applies to the real world more. Opportunities are endless. But grades often portray things like innovation as impossible, suggesting new things can’t be discovered. Often, this is where I have encountered many people saying, “Well, it would be impossible to learn everything,” but shouldn’t that be the point? Shouldn’t students be familiar with the fact that they can always do better and that nobody can know everything?

3. Grades reflect many broad subjects, not just our expertise (and wants).
   
   The great Albert Einstein once said, or maybe didn’t according to some recent sources (but I still love the quote), "Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Grades reflect our “proficiency” in several different subjects. If someone is good at math but not great in art, their grades are lowered overall. It is reasonable that we should want people to have broad knowledge, but we all have subjects we are more proficient in, and that is a great thing. If someone is good in math and loves math but is not as great in art class, they are punished and have a worse GPA. (I am not talking from experience, of course! 🤥)

However, upon recognizing all of this, I still couldn’t lose his answer. It seemed right, and it made sense. Grades should reflect your actual merit, but the sad reality is they (almost always) don’t. What would it take for grades to reflect meaning properly? For them to give helpful feedback and not discourage growth? What would it be if grades were more about us and less about comparison?

Although the classic letter system is still standard for most of the United States, many solutions through private sector schools have gained more popularity in recent years.

A few examples of this I will list:

1. The Socratic Experience
   
   This is the school I attend. For the past three years of going here, I have had minimal worry about my grades. This is the result of having more individualized choices about how I learn and what I am learning, and therefore, how I am graded.

2. Astro Nova
   
   Last year, my friend Silas Tautz and I met with Joshua Dahn to discuss the grading system at Astro Nova. Their scale was simplified using colors instead of numbers, mimicking a traffic light. Green means go to the next level, yellow means still developing, and red means needs development. They use a rubric that deliberately tells students where they can advance.

3. Unschooling
   
   Sometimes, I wonder if not having grades altogether would be more meaningful to learners. In this approach, learning still has a method of feedback; it is just done through discussion with self-sought mentors, friends, and family. Unschooling is a method that has been proven effective for some, Cole Summers for example.

4. Education as a Marketplace
   
   Aquinas Heard shared his idea with me for a unique education model where parents and students treat their education like a marketplace. In this format, students (with their parents’ guidance, if needed) are allocated a certain amount of money through their parents or scholarships to decide which classes they are taking for their education. Since they are the consumers of education and parents are often those who fund it, if a student is not getting enough value from a class, they can drop it. This approach is less coercive and empowers students to take agency over their own learning.

There are many other, better alternatives than conventional grading that I am aware of, but there has yet to be a perfect answer for me. Still, some of the preceding solutions remind me of how much better grades can get at representing the real world.