Children Should Not Be Given Grades

Times have changed and continue to do so, so why are we still giving kids grades? If you have straight A’s you’re a “nerd,” if you have A’s and B’s you’re a “smarty-pants,” and then C average or below? You’re considered “stupid” or “dumb.” These are some generic labels given to kids throughout schooling because of their grades, and this can cause some unwanted issues throughout the school system. Children shouldn't be given grades, they should be given oral evaluations because grades give labels, create unnecessary competition, and don't always accurately reflect how smart a child is.

Grades were intended to be beneficial to students and let them know where they stand in their learning, but they are doing more than that, not in a good way though. A lot of kids are teased about their grades in elementary and middle school. If you didn’t receive the best grades and others found this out you might have found yourself in a rather frustrating situation. I remember one of my siblings in middle school didn’t get very good grades and kids teased her about it, she stopped trying to pass her classes and her grades fell from C/D’s to F’s. If a teacher sees your grades are bad a lot of the time they automatically assume you’re a bad kid. The same goes for getting a job. It would be very hard for you to be hired if you have bad grades, because they automatically assume you are not ready for the responsibility of a job.

Along with that label comes competition. Like in sports people would begin to group you and categorize you, but instead of A team B team, and so on it would be Straight A kids, A’s and B’s kids, C average kids, and Failing kids. Kids fight about who is better, who got the better grade for midterms, and they’ll fight about who ...

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...se smartboards. We can learn something new, we made a drastic change from projectors and pull down screens, to a smartboard. Teachers still take days off to go to teacher class to learn about what they need to be teaching us as students, so I do not see why they could not do the same with transferring letter grades to oral evaluations.

People label kids according to their grades, although they deny that they judge you, they do, even before they have the pleasure of talking to you. That label affects the way people view them and the way they view themselves, it’s time to change that. Although other school do oral evaluations, the student body of New Technology High could really start to promote the idea and talk to other schools in our district about the change, which could spread to other districts, then throughout the states, and hopefully, one by one, the country.