As I was on my way to New York City for Columbus Day weekend, the guy next to me on the bus decided to strike up a conversation.
“How do you like Mill?” he asked.
He was referring to On Liberty, which I was furiously marking up with my pen. I had already decided I was going to spend the weekend tackling the flood of homework headed my way. It has been a tough semester, but I always try to get the best grades I can.
As such, I wasn’t too keen on letting this random guy distract me from my work. Nonetheless, I knew the polite thing to do would be to at least pretend that I was interested in talking to him. When I did, I learned that he had gone to George Washington University to get his Masters in Political Economics. That’s also when he told me something that bothered me all weekend.
“Yeah, I thought the curriculum there was a joke,” he said. “I actually began sabotaging my own papers in order to test how far I could get with faulty arguments … I still kept getting As.”
He said he did this because he wanted to make sure he was being academically challenged, to confirm whether or not his advanced degree was the result of academic coasting.
At first I didn’t think much of it, but as the bus sped toward New York, and I worried about getting back to Mill, I realized how unbelievably narrow-minded I have become. I care so much about grades that I never stop to think about whether I’m actually learning, or whether the professor is challenging me to do my best. I interpret every good grade as a job well done and agonize over every low grade, as if I just lost the Battle of York.
At a place like Georgetown, there are bound to be students who are obsessed with figuring out the tricks of the tests or “what the teacher wants.” I should know, since I’m one of them. But to tell you the truth, I’m sick of it. I literally fantasize about finishing college, not to get into the real world and finally live like an “adult,” but to finally be free from some of the pressure of working for grades and what I perceive to be the approval of my professors.
But maybe “job well done” just means I have an easy professor, and maybe “lost battle” is another way of telling me that I can do better. We’ve all heard people telling us to learn the material and truly interact with it, to not worry about the grades. Most of us will also remember rolling our eyes at that advice. I know what I’m about to say will probably elicit a similar response, especially since it’s cliché, but I think it needs to be repeated until people get it. If we could just focus on learning for the sake of actually picking up a thing or two from that class, the grades will figure themselves out. Maybe we won’t have to worry about GPAs or getting into graduate school or whatever reasons we have for working as hard as we do.
Though students often end up approaching classes from the wrong perspective, part of the problem of obsessing over grades instead of actually learning is also how some classes are structured. After all, a big lecture hall with three tests a semester does not encourage students to really engage with the material. A small discussion class in which the teacher is sitting across the table waiting for your substantive contribution does. Universities should do away with big lecture hall courses whenever they can and focus more on small discussion classes.
After all, students in big lecture classes are more prone to freaking out about grades because they don’t have enough feedback to gauge where they stand. Students in the smaller courses get feedback every time they go to class. Where the kids in the lecture hall study and worry when it’s time for a test, the kids in the smaller class are naturally more concerned with actually interacting with the material in preparation for every class they have. I myself have experienced this difference in lesson structure. I read everything for my weekly seminar of 15 students but I only crack open my economics book before the test.
That random comment from that random dude on the bus put things into perspective for me. I know I will still work hard, but now I’ll think of the guy with the weird accent and remember that the whole point of going to college—aside from other, ahem, equally important experiences—is not to become perfect. It’s pretty cheesy, but college is about pushing your intellectual limits and, if you’re really good, transcending them. Next time we’re sweating over our grades—and I know this is going to sound radical—we all need to remember that college is about learning.
