School is universally known as a place of learning. People go to school to develop skills and knowledge so that they can one day become contributing members of society with decent paying jobs. In addition, school also serves as a means to gauge student performance and determine which students go to which colleges and get better jobs. Though these two purposes make up the status quo of the current education system, what isn’t often recognized is how true learning with the long-term development of skills and knowledge can’t easily coexist with student testing, especially with grades. Grades, as an extrinsic motivator for students, have been the benchmark of the education system as the defined measurement of learning. However, its consequences, as understood within social psychological research, on students and their learning experiences have gone largely ignored. By constantly measuring students and dangling grades above their heads, the American education system has inadvertently created toxic effects upon student learning that is contrary to its goals. 

It was the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 that established the current status quo for the American education system. Augmenting the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, ESSA was created “to provide all children significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps.” In order to accomplish this, the federal government has granted states full autonomy over their education systems, though 43 states utilize the Common Core system, so long as they can meet the government’s expectations. They must present to the federal government a means of academic standards, annual testing, goals for academic achievement, and yearly state and local report cards to document progress. States are mandated to intervene if schools are in the bottom 5% of the country and have lower than a 67% graduation rate for more than four years. This all boils down to one thing: grades. For individual schools, principals, and even teachers it’s all about test scores to see if students continue to meet the goal set by the state or else they will face the consequences like being fired or having the school shut down. To this end, school becomes point-centric with the false assumption that grades are the same thing as learning. 

The premier problem that lies within education legislation since its inception is the act of equating performance on tests with what students have learned. Take your average high school exam for instance; teachers often divide their subject up into different topics with the students learning one topic at a time, get tested on that topic, and then move onto the next topic. For example, a US history class will have you learn about the Civil War separately from World War I. Students are consistently forced to study short-term for tests only for them to immediately move on to the next topic without going back to past material. This is because teachers’ priorities, of which their jobs depend on, are for completion of testing all material since they only have the school year to do so. As is stated on the Common Core website, the express purpose of learning any academic subject is for the development of various skills including literacy, analysis of information, lines of logic, and others. Nowhere does it mention actually learning information and committing it to long-term memory as a goal for school classrooms. This wholly explains why if students fail on exams teachers are not mandated to go back over the material because their job isn’t to make sure students know material, but to measure “skills” through performance on exams. This is hugely problematic because it means students will only gain these generalizable skills like literacy and analysis if they succeed (many don’t) and likely will not have expertise in the content of any subject without intrinsic motivation to do so. A study from research at five American Universities found that college students only remember 40% of what they learned in high school in the first week of college. Therefore, schools are completely failing to create well-rounded citizens who can comprehend American and World Politics, understand economics, stay up to date with current events, and can do their own accounting among other things. It begs the question if the current system’s priority of these skills and its measurements of students are worth it. 

As a direct result of the standardized measurement of students is toxic grading culture which is the negative effects grading has on students’ lives. Conceptually, grading is a process where students are tasked to do something, be it an assignment or an exam, so that their performance on that task can be documented. Legally, the federal government sees grades as a means of measuring school performance as a whole, but it completely fails to recognize the students’ perception. Grades, by serving as a metric of intelligence, effectively convince students how intelligent they are relative to their peers which has serious consequences for all students, be it high scoring or low scoring.

For the high scoring students, what develops is a competitive mindset that prioritizes grades over curiosity. It is undeniable that high scoring students are cognizant of the importance of achievement and GPA for their futures. Whether it be for applying to competitive colleges or to graduate schools, these students know that their future jobs, and potentially their entire careers, are on the line if they don’t succeed in outcompeting their peers. Therefore learning becomes a task rather than a happy pastime. As recorded by a survey conducted by Stanford University, of 56,000 high school students who attended schools where the majority of graduates go on to selective colleges, “76 percent of students reported that they always or often worry about the possibility of not doing well in school,” including with their homework and assessments. The stress for these students is high with their daily lives consisting of all AP courses, averaging about 3-5 quizzes a week, with various assignments and extracurricular commitments. With such an immense and important burden, school isn’t about learning, but about getting points. Along the same vein, altruistic volunteering has become a selfish task, knowing that it will be added to resumes or mandatory for things like National Honor Society. The overjustification effect of social psychology describes this effect very well. Originally studied by Edward Deci in 1971, the overjustification effect suggests that when a strong external pressure to do something exists, such as to learn and have a high GPA, people will lose their intrinsic motivation to do it or in this case to have curiosity and learn on their own accord. Whether it be their fear for their future success, parental dissatisfaction, or comparisons to their peers, this external pressure very much exists for students. Grades completely alter the motivation of students away from self-motivated and curious learning so that they can be tested for grades. 

Even more unfortunate is what occurs to lower scoring students. These students, at least at the beginning of their academic journeys, feel the same pressure that the high scoring students do to succeed, except they don’t measure up in the end. A negative feeling, or dissonance as it is called in social psychology, occurs when they fail and do worse than their peers.  If this trend continues, these students begin to see themselves as intellectually inferior to their peers. Psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman describes this as The Theory of Learned-Helplessness. In short, the more someone has experienced a stressful situation which results in a perceived failure, the more they come to believe that they are unable to control or change the situation, so they do not try—even when opportunities for change become available. Seligman demonstrated this with students in a classroom who continually exhibited less and less motivation to succeed with every preceding failure. These students, even worse than the effects upon high scoring students, often lose interest in their education because they have come to believe they are less than their peers. 

Whether it be high scoring students, low scoring students, or everyone in between, the grading system and standardized testing has only served to harm the mental health and education of students. Furthermore, it needs to be questioned whether the education that students are receiving today is truly best for their futures. As is the objective in the general Common Core system, education has become about the cultivation of general skills, not the accumulation of specific knowledge and expertise in subjects. Even if a student has interest in a subject, they face the obstacles of toxic grading culture within a system that hinders curiosity and exploration of their preferred subjects. So many students are either too demoralized or too focused on grades themselves to find and learn what they love. If American education is to improve, the toxic effects of grades upon students need to be recognized so everyone can see that the measurement of grades is not only insufficient evidence of student learning, but actually detracts from the education experience.