What’s your GPA?

An hour and a half of remedial math, some teenagers struggling to perform at grade level, some understimulated, everyone bored, an incompetent teacher who delegates the responsibility for class control and pedagogy to her more able, I mean more obsequious, students—and it’s universally mandatory until the end of the semester. Public high school? Hell no—this was Frontiers of Science, and what I described above constituted my very first step into the Styx of higher education.

Looking back on it, learning anything from the class was out of the question. My seminar leader was wretched, and education for the sake of education is simply not possible when there’s a requirement that nearly everyone hates. I could have gotten something out of it, though: a grade; so I’m only a little embarrassed that after discovering I got a B-plus—this after a late burst of sitting in the front, evincing interest, completing ‘independent projects,’ ‘taking the initiative,’ pretending to buy into ‘peer learning,’ and attaching clip-art to my homework—I considered transferring. This might have been good for Columbia and me, but I was rejected from everywhere I wanted to go because my grades were mediocre. It’s like how SEAS will let you bow out, but you have to have the grades to do it.

Many of my later bad grades have been my own fault, but not all of them. Learning should always be the goal of a class. But if requirements curb curiosity and force venality, then they should at least be equitable in their student assessments. They aren’t. CULPA pages are littered with reviews attesting to this.

The grades issue is, I’m sure, tied to another way in which requirements are bungled: grad students. Grad students teach Art Humanities, Music Humanities, University Writing, and some teach Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilizations too, not to mention the introduction classes for your major. We might as well throw away the pretense that these are the most important classes of college if full professors aren’t teaching them. But grad students—speaking very broadly—are bad in another way. They grade oddly and capriciously, more on effort than capability. An A-minus and a B-plus are often the only available marks. Everyone is above average, but only by so much. I suspect this is based on insecurity. Grad students are the antithesis of ‘too cool for school.’ A friend and I conducted a post-mortem of our Art Hum instructor. He said that “she was a tough grader for someone who didn’t demonstrate very acute intelligence.” There has to be some way of demonstrating their superiority. It comes at the undergrads’ expense—we are, after all, the paying customers.

A less pressing issue is the imbalance in grades between different departments. Your GPA can be determined more by your major than by your talent and effort. This could be cut down by eliminating the A-plus. Which other school has these? They flourish only in our quantitative departments. All our valedictorians and salutatorians come from fields that give lousy speeches. If your abilities are really so remarkable, an A should be enough, and if you’re working hard enough to get an A-plus, you’re wasting your time. Academic success should come as a happy accident—not from hours of miserable travail.

After applying a certain amount of effort, you start to hit diminishing returns. A race to the top in GPA is a race to the bottom in learning. This brings me to the problem at hand. Your GPA is a poor metric of what you got out of your experience, and an even poorer one for what you will get out of future experiences. This wouldn’t be a concern if Professor Peter Bearman’s cliche that ‘your grades in college do not matter’ was true. But it isn’t. Bearman assigns them anyway, and they do matter—for grad school, for jobs, for whatever you will do after college.

People talk a lot about grades at Columbia. The proof of their primacy is in the talking. On my visits to Reed, Pomona, and Amherst, the topic has been taboo—they are as meaningless and as seldom talked about as SAT scores. But our culture here has much more in common with a big, public research university than a small liberal arts college. The Darwinian market of New York exerts its workaholic pull. We are encouraged to compare ourselves to others, not others to ourselves, and find one or the other wanting. ‘Comparisons are odious,’ goes the old platitude. But what else do we have? I think the big lesson here is that people care about grades here as a means of asserting themselves over an experience over which they may have very little control. As in the case of this column, it is self-defeating.

Chris Morris-Lent is a Columbia College senior majoring in English. Politics runs alternate Thursdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com