Choice: Knowledge Vs Grades

Last week, I watched a student have a breakdown over getting a B+ instead of an A. Although they understood the material brilliantly, they were upset anyway, not about the subject but about the 0.02 it knocked off their CGPA.

I understand why. Most of us grew up refreshing results pages. But if you step back for a second, it is a strange thing to lose sleep over, because the understanding was the point, and the understanding was fine.

The bicycle and the unicycle

Sal Khan's talk on mastery learning has an analogy I keep coming back to. Imagine learning to ride a bicycle, taking a test after a week, scoring 80%, and then moving straight on to the unicycle. Nobody would teach cycling that way, and yet that is how we teach almost everything else.

A topic gets covered, tested once and graded, and then we move on. The 20% you did not get just sits there until calculus stops making sense because algebra never fully did, and by the time the whole thing starts wobbling, nobody can say exactly where it started.

"Will this be on the test?"

Then there's Sir Ken Robinson's talk on schools killing creativity, still one of the most watched TED talks ever. His argument is that we educate people out of their creative capacities. I would add that we do it quite efficiently, and that the tool we use is the exam.

Think about the most common question in any classroom. It is rarely "why does this work?" and almost always "will this be on the test?" If marks are what you are being judged on, that is a completely rational question to ask, but it is also the moment curiosity quietly leaves the room.

I am not writing this from outside, either. I asked that question too. Most of us learned early that the fastest route to a good score is to figure out what the examiner wants and give exactly that, nothing more.

Cramming isn't knowing

High marks and real understanding overlap a lot less than we pretend. Even if you binge on a chapter the night before, pour it onto the answer sheet and forget it by the following week, the marksheet cannot tell the difference. Neither can your relatives.

I know people with perfect GPAs who can't think their way out of a paper bag. And I know college dropouts who could teach a masterclass on the thing they love.

Meanwhile, the kid who goes three hours deep into a Wikipedia rabbit hole on something that isn't in the syllabus gets nothing for it, and sometimes worse than nothing, because those were three hours not spent revising.

I am not saying grades mean nothing. While they are a rough signal, the trouble starts when we treat the signal as the thing itself.

So which one?

If you optimize for grades, you learn what is needed for the paper, avoid risky answers, and let it all go once the semester ends. If you optimize for knowledge, you go deeper on what fascinates you, ask questions that don't have neat answers, and actually remember things, because they mattered to you.

You cannot always do both, and I am not going to pretend the marks never mattered. Sometimes they decide which door opens next, and choosing them once in a while is not a crime.

What I find funny is that choosing knowledge often works out anyway, just not in a way a transcript can show. When I am talking to someone about a job, I care much more about whether they can explain how something works than about what they scored in it, which is a very different exam.

Maybe it is time we graded the education system instead of the students, although I am not sure it would pass.

So, the A+ you will forget by next year, or the understanding you will still be using in ten?

P.S. If you're reading this the night before an exam, go study. We can argue about the system after the paper.