Grades are everything.

This notion has been perpetuated with each passing year of high school. Our grades define our academic performance which determines where we go to college which determines a whole slew of other things.

The ability to check our grades at any time coupled with the academically-competitive atmosphere already in place at Glenbrook North foster a significant amount of anxiety among students. But it’s not the learning that’s stressful; we don’t stress over how deeply we understand the content of our class work. Our anxiety really has nothing to do with the classes at all.

It’s the grade itself that’s torturous, and our constant access to that number that catalyzes a new dimension of stress.

School is not as simple as achieving good grades through inborn motivation to learn alone. Grades are the extrinsic motivation that push us to strive in class, to get our homework done and study for tests. We aren’t thinking about the learning as much as we are thinking about that little letter, the fluctuating reminder that we are succeeding or failing. If we were intrinsically motivated by our sheer interest in a subject or our willingness to learn, students would not find themselves up late poring over a number on PowerSchool or dealing with severe anxiety over whether or not they will get into a “good” college when a low B appears next to “Precalculus.”

If the solution was cut-and-dried and we all readily obeyed the foreboding advice to stop checking grades so obsessively, the tides might shift. We might even start remembering class content after the test. 

But we check grades because they matter. After the test, it’s a relief to know the score you received. Grades are the incentive many students need to push themselves. They are the reason we are tested at all, the reason we compete, a way to know where we stand on the scale of academic success.

Perhaps grades are a kind of vice that inhibit actual learning, but they’re also a part of our culture we must simply accept and adapt to. As great as it would be to separate the significance of our education from our numeric value on PowerSchool, it’d be difficult to take away students’ access to grades. That being said, we can make our incessant checking of grades a lesson about beneficial restraint, limiting our day-to-day usage of PowerSchool. If checking grades can be viewed for what it is — a vice — then maybe we can learn a bit about moderation in the process.