It’s midterm season and most students are locked in — eyes fixed on laptop screens, pens scribbling notes and calculators computing complex problems. The motivation of getting a perfect score keeps one up all night, forcing students to cram and memorize 13 lectures at once. But even if one performs well on the test, it doesn’t really measure how well the content was understood — just how well it was memorized.
Even though grades are a standardized way to measure content retained by students, this does not support the learning process in the long term, as it turns into a memorization race, fear of choosing challenging classes and causes burnout and anxiety with test stress.
Primarily, when taking a test, all that comes to mind is, “What is the minimum score needed to get an A?” When grades are at stake, students turn to pure memorization, skipping the critical thinking part of the learning process. Many ask whether a topic will be on the exam or not, rather than actually understanding the concepts taught, making learning a gamble of which concepts will be on the exam.
Although one might see an increase in their focus time with methods like pomodoro or routine building, this actually reduces long-term learning. Learning requires making mistakes and improving from them. But when mistakes come with consequences, especially grade point average (GPA) tanking, learning stops and turns into a war between the class material and the student.
This battle doesn’t just stop here. Grades can affect the classes that students decide to take in college. Instead of taking more challenging courses, students often choose which ones would be GPA savers. Conversations about choosing classes go from “oh, this class seems interesting” to “this is an easy A class.” This is concerning because challenging courses help prepare students for their future academic journey, whether it is graduate school, medical school or any other postgraduate programs.
But if one is fearful of taking difficult courses, they lose the opportunity to engage with challenging content and enhance their critical thinking skills. The consequence of failing a class and having a lower GPA hinders the development of many adaptive and advanced skills, such as leadership and networking, which are helpful for future endeavors — whether academic or not.
In the process of saving a GPA, students also experience mental health issues. The pressure of higher grades can lead to anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts and even psychosis since performance weighs heavily on students’ future jobs, financial aid eligibility and even everyday life benefits, including lower rates on car insurance. This intense pressure can make learning a process of torture. Student mental health is connected to the rise of memorization and a lack of deep critical thinking because now the brain turns from learning mode to survival mode. In the end, “chasing the perfect GPA” leaves students feeling burned out and demotivated.
Therefore, GPA and grades are not good indicators of student learning. They not only degrade the long-term process of learning but also hinder improvement, as most grades are letters and lack input for refinement. Rather than learning the concepts, students are competing in a memorization race and betting on which question will be on the test. This eliminates critical understanding of the material and cultivates a short-term memory process in which students retain knowledge only until test day.
Education should be a journey of discovery and learning, not a sprint to achieve golden grades on transcripts.
