The Impact of Grades on Mental Health

Students spend 480 minutes at school a day which is equal to 8 hours, it’s important to get the best out of all that time spent in one building. Every schools district has its own style of teaching and learning techniques and each style can be beneficial to a student’s education or can be unproductive. Some may believe that grades give a lot of structure of intelligence but there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way to teach kindergartners through seniors, but there are many ways to improve how students feel about school. In addition, that would be removing grades from school systems. Grades should be taken out of school system programs for 6-12 graders because it causes stress levels to be uncontrollable, students’ lack engagement, and grit is more important than accuracy. 

Mental health is the most important part of who you are, if you feel good you will be your best-self. Stress affects students more than anyone especially with busy schedules, by reason of they go home from school, eats, hurries up to get to their sports practice or game, comes home at 8 p.m., tries to finish homework before they have to go to bed, and then wakes up just to do it all over again. At school, grades cause students to not even care about the material being taught, but they just want to get their work done so don’t have to worry about it, since they already have 2 projects due tomorrow at 11:59 p.m. It’s a lot to put onto kids and this eventually causes stress and depression for that reason they feel as if they don’t get at least a ‘B’ on their quiz they aren’t smart enough. Accordingly, to TIMES UNION’s article that describes how limited schools talk about mental illnesses and how rare it is to see schools truly putting programs out for students who feels depressed or stressed. This study wanted to show how popular these issues are and how much they face in a school environment. (Duvell Tessa.) So, yes a bad small grade can really effect a student.

Typically, most classes being taught to students aren’t engaging and if there is no excitement going on in a classroom you will see the grade of effort going down. With lack of engagement, there isn’t anything they want to try for. Putting grades on classes that could mean less to them is unrealistic to seek for higher investment in a course. Taking out grades would lead to them wanting to try harder to know if they mess up they won’t flunk the class and have to come to their house with an adult disappointed at them. A solution would be teaching things that cause a hook of interest. A report called  “The Effect of Marketing Simulations on Student Engagement and Academic Outcomes.” makes a point saying that giving students a little taste of real-world simulations will ensure engagement as this will show students a real-life skill that makes it easier for them to learn without the boring part. This will show them that life is more than letter grades, but it’s a world of creativity. With no grades on simple fun functioning projects, they will be drawn in by how much they can do and learn with the learning tools they will actually use.

Students 6th-8th grade spends almost 3 and a half hours on homework a week, 9th-12th spend closer to 4 hours a week. Teachers always say the saying “You get out what you put into it…” but is that true? Nevertheless, students only get out of what the teachers show and grade them on, isn’t right, especially when grit and effort mean more than how many questions they get right. This meaning there shouldn’t be a grade on accuracy and should be more based on the effort since there are things such as cheating and plagiarism that could be happening. For example, Person A is a straight-A student which is apparently defined as ‘smart’, with amazing grades and no clutter in their life, but they cheat, and they ask everyone for answers to things that they put no effort on. Person B has a couple C’s in their classes, but puts more effort into every assignment more than anyone can, person B doesn’t cheat nor ask others for answers. Teachers will obviously reward person A since they seem like the go-to perfect student type. This is rewarding cheating and fake behavior person A possesses. A leadership article has a quote that states “In a grittier world, we really wouldn’t be forcing kids to do tons of practice on the hard things that they don’t care about; we would find ways to have them be playful and enjoy things.” (McKibben, Sarah) this represents how effort means more than practices of things students don’t enjoy nor benefit from. 

Some may argue those grades are important to schools, since they reflect how well your academic intelligence is in school and it’s also something colleges can look at for students, however, there is no pop quiz or exam that can truly measure what a student is capable of achieving in the real world and taking out the grading system in schools will help schools know who they really are past all the report cards and essays written.

Grading systems can’t better anyone more than what they do. All they do is stress students, make students lack engagement, and teach students that their accuracy is more important than grit put into their work. Maybe if this change starts small, there will be more and more schools seeing this argumentative issue and soon students will be excited to come to school every morning.