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SamanthaWishmanFirstPaper 7 - 23 Apr 2012 - Main.JaredMiller
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| | | I said that employers and peers may disprove of us opting out; however, I did not mean to indicate that we should care. Quite the opposite, in fact. What I am trying to say is that it's an inescapable reality that we will be judged on our academic record. Opting out will not be a rabbit hole allowing us to get away from this truth. The only way to free ourselves from the confines of the system is to tell ourselves that others' judgment of us on these bases are meaningless.
I definitely did not mean to say that I think grades should be abandoned. Quite the contrary- we should not opt out of grades, but should use them in a way that best suits us. We need to divorce from the pervasive mentality of tying them to our self-worth. It's undisputed that grades can be effective in pushing us to learn. I only wish they were less effective in defining us. To make that happen, though, we need to change our mentality, not opt out of the system.
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> | Hello Abby! I think there's a bit of confusion between what we're saying, so sorry for not being clearer. I never thought you were advocating abandoning grades. My little side note at the end was not really at all addressed to your comments but instead just to the idea that grades have no value at all (I completely agree with you that it's not grades per se that are the problem but instead the way the law school fails to supplement grades with constructive criticism and feedback.) I guess my point is this: If grades do more benefit to you than harm, if you think they help you learn and help incentivize you to dive deeper into the material, then keep them. If you find instead that they're more trouble than they're worth, that they're destructive to your academic experience, that you can't turn off the part of your brain that says "these things are important" and that negatively affects the way you learn, then go credit/fail. Having grades can help. Not having grades can help. Just decide what's best for you.
(Though I will say that in "deciding what's best for you," it's interesting to see what default the school chooses and how that affects your own choice. Obviously, choosing to have no grades becomes a much easier option to pick when most other students are in the same boat. By putting the default at grades, it seems that the school has decided that what's 'best' for at least the majority of students is to have grades rather than not. I wonder if that assumption is really valid...)
PS Sorry for taking over your paper, Sam, but thanks for provoking this conversation!
-- JaredMiller - 23 Apr 2012 |
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