Grades matter. College admissions and early career opportunities largely hinge on them. For those who excel academically, grades are a passport to a comfortable middle-class life; for those who don’t, grades become “scarlet letters” that brand them as lazy or inept and, in effect, unworthy of a decent living. Given these stakes, it’s no wonder that today’s students are facing unprecedented levels of stress—much of it academically induced—contributing to an “anxiety epidemic.” Add to that the fact that educational attainment has become the biggest predictor of American voting behavior, and the significance of grades for the body politic looms even larger. 

But are grades even necessary? Given their role in determining mental health, social mobility, and even, indirectly, electoral outcomes, are they actually accomplishing the goals we set out for them? Are those goals even desirable in the first place? In Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It, education professor Joshua R. Eyler lays out a multipronged case against grades, arguing the standard grading model used by most schools and colleges is “pernicious.” 

This standard model has been around for only about a century, and despite its ubiquity, educators have been skeptical from the beginning. Traditional grades, Eyler argues, are bad for mental health, bad for pedagogy, and bad for marginalized groups. As a result, “the costs of grades far exceed any of their imagined benefits.” In place of the traditional model, we should develop alternative, “gradeless” models where feedback and iteration are prioritized and letter or numeric grades are minimized or eliminated.

As Eyler argues, grades are “classic extrinsic motivators”: they incentivize you to act on account of reward or punishment. Extrinsic motivation is effective in certain circumstances: when we really don’t want to do something or when compliance must be enforced. But in the absence of intrinsic motivations—the desire to pursue something for its own sake—incentives tend to produce an instrumentalizing attitude. Academic work becomes a mere means to procure a good grade or avoid a bad one. Grades thus encourage “maximizing behavior,” as demonstrated in questions you commonly hear from students like, “What’s the bare minimum I can do to get a C?” These students are exhibiting “performance-avoidant behavior,” according to studies cited by Eyler. That is, they’re working only to avoid performing less well than others. Grades thus promote compliance but nothing more; they fail to promote—and they even inhibit—mastery. 

This “incentive structure,” Eyler argues, “is wildly misaligned with learning.” Learning requires failure, iteration, and intellectual risk-taking. “Grades interrupt that cycle at every step” by demonizing failure and discouraging deviation from the status quo. When I’ve spoken privately with students hesitant to participate in seminars, they often show less a lack of interest than a fear of “saying something wrong.” Students tend to fixate on grades and to understand their GPAs as revelations of their true identities and cognitive limits. They routinely tell me that they avoid pursuing their interests in favor of courses they’ve calculated are likelier to produce a good grade. But empirical evidence shows that students learn best when they care about the material at hand and want to improve their understanding. 

Now, one might object, “Intrinsic motivation may well be better, but in its absence, what other recourse do we have?” Granted. Many students do seem wholly uninterested in learning, as George Leef of the conservative James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal notes in a scathing review of Eyler’s book. Though uncharitable, Leef’s review does get at the fundamental question about Eyler’s gradeless future: Does it adequately account for the reality of human motivation? Or is Eyler succumbing, as Leef argues, to a Rousseauian reverie detached from the real world? But Leef’s view—which suggests education is a great “sorting machine” cataloging students by natural merits—is dubious as well. As Eyler and others have noted, the idea of merit is illusory, and competitive outcomes are conditioned by “opportunity gaps,” differences in starting points, environmental factors, and luck. 

Nevertheless, the question remains: Do students need competitive motivation in order to learn? Many philosophers argue otherwise. For example, the opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics reads, “All human beings stretch themselves out toward knowing by nature.” Often translated as simply “All humans desire to know,” Aristotle’s point is much stronger. The word oregetai (“stretching toward”) is used, for example, to refer to erotically yearning for a spouse. We yearn for knowledge as the utmost completion of our nature. Flourishing requires the full realization of our most essential capacities, and the capacity to learn is arguably our most essential—it makes us what we are.

But if Aristotle is right, where does the total lack of motivation every teacher encounters come from? Social conditioning is easy to mistake for nature—even more so when one has a vested interest in naturalizing a particular accidental aspect of society. In capitalist societies, scholastic assessment reflects and reinforces capitalist values. Grades, to put it bluntly, are a kind of currency. Given that money is the ultimate means, we should not be surprised if the currency of grades is itself responsible for students’ treatment of education as instrumental and the loss of their intrinsic motivation to learn. In other words, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Learning requires leisure (the Greeks called it schole, from which we get “school”), which is the opposite of business (the Latins called it neg-otium, the negation of leisure). We should not be surprised that learning becomes deformed when it is treated like a negotiation.

What about the objection that we need grades as verification that students have actually learned something? Especially for those subject areas for which the consequences of poor learning are highest—such as medicine and engineering—a gradeless approach seems likely to end up certifying incompetent practitioners. This objection suffers from what Eyler calls “the measurement fallacy.” It conflates evaluation (the conferral of a rating or ranking) with assessment (feedback on what works and what doesn’t). One can assess without evaluating, and all of the gradeless approaches Eyler outlines focus on feedback as the primary response to student work. Feedback and “narrative evaluations” can simply take the place of grades on report cards. There’s evidence that doing so is good for student learning, good for student mental health, and perfectly serviceable for college admissions. 

Descriptive reports communicate a great deal more than a grade does, providing details and context grades lack. Grades are certainly easier to produce, Eyler argues, but they ultimately communicate the illusion of objectivity more than actual objective content. They reflect the degree to which a student meets an individual teacher’s learning standards within the context of a particular class, and those standards are far from universal. Eyler may go too far here, suggesting that grades are basically subjective despite the meaningful, broadly shared disciplinary expectations that inform grading, but his central point is well-taken.

Most teachers, including those who absolutely love teaching, agree that grading can be agonizing. It’s one of the most challenging and least rewarding parts of the profession. Because most teachers genuinely care for their students, giving bad marks can hurt almost as much as receiving them. Administrations, meanwhile, offer little support; they’re often explicit about the goal of putting—and keeping—students in seats and moving them onward toward graduation. (“Retention” has become, to my ear, one of the most baleful words in the English language.) Teachers are pushed to adopt the attitude that “the customer is always right,” even though learning—the process of growing from ignorance to mastery—is based on almost exactly the opposite principle. They’re discouraged from holding students accountable for lack of mastery or, worse, for academic dishonesty. A department chair once told me that, because it was Lent, I should simply remind a student caught plagiarizing to be contrite. On another occasion, I received a call from a dean who, like a mob boss, instructed me to simply pretend I hadn’t just emailed with evidence of misconduct.

Eyler’s case against the traditional grading model—especially in its most blunt form where students are simply given grades without any meaningful feedback or opportunities to try again—is convincing. His concise review of alternative models is also helpful for thinking through pedagogically richer and more just grading practices. Still, there are a few things missing in his account.

First of all—and by Eyler’s own admission—there isn’t yet sufficient empirical evidence to judge the pedagogical efficacy of gradeless models. Without that evidence and given the complexities involved, arguing for wholesale adoption at the institutional and state levels is premature. Adopting a new program just because it seems reasonable can have serious consequences: Marie Clay’s “Reading Recovery” system, for example, proved disastrous for child literacy. Eyler’s rhetoric is worrying at times, making him sound less like a social scientist and more like a true believer. There’s still a lot to learn here, as Eyler’s comparison of Vermont’s (successful) and Maine’s (failed) implementations of gradeless approaches in public schools shows. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was fond of saying, “Don’t think, but look!”

Second, though Eyler acknowledges them, he doesn’t fully consider the institutional barriers involved in trying to upend the status quo, and he overestimates what parents and teachers can do on their own. Parents can certainly focus less on grades with their children and more on what’s learned and on other important topics, like friendship. And they should, especially considering the unhealthy degree to which grades condition parent-child interactions about school: one study of Florida students found they suffered domestic violence at four times the ordinary rate on Saturdays after a report card had been released the previous day. Likewise, teachers can begin implementing new grading protocols on their own. But asking already overworked teachers to revise syllabi and assignments with no institutional support or administrator buy-in is a bit like asking households to make sure they separate their recyclables while oil companies ramp up pollution. Individual efforts are worthwhile, of course, but their ultimate success depends on systemic change at the highest levels.  

Failing Our Future
How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It
Joshua R. Eyler
Johns Hopkins University Press
$27.95 | 208 pp.