Last semester, I had a student who was very engaged, very enthusiastic, and very attentive. She was also obsessed with grades. When she discovered someone scored a higher grade than she on an exam, she pitched a fit. She misapprehends what the true purpose of college is, and college is part of the reason for her misapprehension.
Like so many others I have seen, this young lady was headed into the medical field. The nursing program weights the GPA of a candidate higher than I think is wisely warranted. You see, GPA is no valuable predictor of dedication, reliability, sacrifice, and fitness for employment. What it tells me is that they are very good at regurgitating information, and nothing else reliably. I know many people, myself included, who had high GPAs but who have not risen to the highest heights of what the world refers to as "success". This is the major reason why I worry less about grades.
My senior semester of undergraduate, I took a very difficult course in Metabolic Regulation. It was renown as a course that destroyed egos and illusions of control. After my first exam, I went to see the professor. You see, I don't study for hours on end to earn a 71%, and I wasn't even one of those students who did well without studying. I put a lot into this, and I asked the professor what I should do differently when studying. His answer surprised me. He told me I shouldn't change a thing. After the final, I went to his office to get my final semester grade. He told me, although someone has since eclipsed this accomplishment, that I had obtained the highest ever total score in his course after some twelve years teaching it. You see, his theory was that his tests held you accountable for everything he felt you should know, and that if you knew everything about a particular subject already, then there was really no reason for you to take the course. I had mastered a significant and impressive fraction of information at the undergraduate level, and he rewarded me accordingly.
I used to tell this young lady to stop trying to prove to me how smart she was. I already knew that. I knew that if I wanted to, I could ask her anything, and she'd at least hit a ground ball to the infield. What I actually desired to see was that she was learning. Learning is the true purpose of college, and if you have not learned in a course, the course has been a failure.
Properly done, college teaches you how to learn. It does not exist to teach you what to learn, although in the process that also occurs, or where to learn or how fast to learn or for what reason you should learn. People come to college with preconceived notions of that already, things they learned in their homes and in their earlier schooling. Instead of learning, students concern themselves with what's going to be on the test, where we are in the text, etc., when I'm trying to teach them things that will transform their lives. No, I won't ask my introductory chemistry students to explain the difference between Tylenol and generics, but I explained it to them because it was relevant to their lives and empowers them to make better choices. If they have not learned, then I have failed, no matter what their grades are. Conversely, no matter what your grade is, it is possible that you have learned.
This is how I know that even students who fail can ultimately be success stories. I think back to my first semester in Vegas when a young lady came to my office just two weeks before the semester ended. She wanted to save her grade, which was a 42%, and there was nothing I could really do to help her. Instead, I began by saying, "The next time you take this course..." and talked about how this was a learning experience for her. I have the great honor of knowing that she was ultimately accepted into the nursing program, and I hope she is doing well applying the lessons she learned from me and from others.
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