Impact of grades on students

The general norm is that students who achieve their highest scores in a classroom are the smartest ones, while the ones who are unsuccessful in gaining good grades are not progressing as well. This might be true to some extent, but even some school ERP would agree otherwise. 

Purpose of grades

Every tool that an institution uses has a unique purpose. For example, the attendance management software is specifically made to track student attendance and their presence in classrooms and other school activities, the assignment management system tracks how much effort students are putting outside classrooms, etc. Similarly, the grading system has the purpose of informing the guardians of a student how well a child is performing in the different subjects. 

Although grades are supposed to be very private, disclosed to students first and then to the parents by the teachers, it has been done extremely publicly in traditional forms of learning. 

Benefits of grading system

  • Imbibes among the students a spirit of positive competition where they try to score better than how they had performed in their previous examination.
  • Encourages improvement among students up to some extent, scaling their theoretical learning properties and ability to conceptualize textbook data and transforming them into answers.
  • Improves objective values of students.
  • Allows students to have a common goal, which is to get good grades, which solves a lot of problems and helps them make their own goals in the future.
  • Parents can remain on track with their student’s progress up to some extent, allowing them to take steps to improve the performance of their children.

Drawbacks of grading system

  • It is an incomplete method of measuring and rating the skills of a student where the same scale of measurement is used for every child.
  • Creates a sense of competition among students, which turns into unhealthy forms of competing with each other.
  • Demotivate students who don’t score that well, they eventually develop self-esteem and confidence issues.
  • Often students who achieve higher grades deviate from their path since they have already felt accomplished at certain points in time.

Psychological effects of graduation on students

Presently, the grading system measures only quantitative aspects of students and announces it almost publicly every year. It has proven harmful for the students, especially the ones who receive low grades continuously.

The grades themselves are not the problem, it is how they are treated because of the grades that make a difference. In some schools, even in the presence of for graduation system, students are injured to support all their students equally and motivate them to perform better in academics and other aspects of their school life. This way, the Topper does not feel like they have achieved every goal and does not deviate from their original goal, which is to become a successful individual in the future, and realizes that a grade is not supposed to guarantee success in the future. Similarly, students who score low are given equal importance and encouragement by teachers to keep studying harder.

In short, when students avoid favoritism because teachers are professionally trained to benefit every child and not only the toppers, the negative impact of the graduation system is avoided. Parents are also equal partakers in this. No parent would want their child to have an inferiority complex developing in them due to a lack of positive affirmations. Institutions can take a step ahead and educate parents about the impacts of grades on their children and how every parent can deal with their ward in case they receive a bad or good grade.

What we have to understand is that getting bad grades first impacts the child, making them lose confidence in themselves and their learning capacity. On top of this, if parents and teachers also express their grievances with this child due to their low grades, they are left completely isolated with themselves where they see the negative aspects of their grades only with lets grounds to grab and improve on. They do need to be criticized if they score incredibly low, but along with criticism, they need equal amounts of motivation and someone to believe in them that they can indeed do better despite their present bad performance.

The psychological impact of grades can further appreciate child performance if grading systems are the only methods of evaluating a child’s performance. Institutions should switch to more qualitative measures of student performance, such as taking aptitude tests and evaluating them based on their skill development.

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