Learning should be more important then grades

My opponent makes a number of arguments which I will attempt to group and refute. 1) *A writing major or artist does not need good grades in math or physics to suceed in life* I have two responses. First, my opponent is incorrect. Grades are a proxy for effort. Colleges look at grades in high school because they are the best predicators of success during college, regardless of major. Two studies of the UC system found that "high-school grade point average [] is consistently the best predictor not only of freshman grades in college [] but of four-year college outcomes as well." [1] Malcolm Gladwell also discusses in the book Outliers that the best predictor of good performance in math and science was completion percentage of the *optional* quesitonnaire during the TIMSS test. Students who had the patience to fill out more option questions did better in performance. The lesson is that even if a student is not *naturally* proficient at a given subject, the student learns something extremely valuable (patience) from having to expend effort to learn a difficult subject. Colleges want students who have learned *how to learn.* Grades are a proxy for whether a student has learned how to learn. A student who has acquired this important skill can carry it forward to *any major* or to *anything* in life. Without grades, students have less of an incentive to work hard in difficult subjects. Students would simply give up and focus only on the subjects they liked, because there would be no downside. Grades help teach patience and teach students how to learn. 2) *Half the things used in school are not useful in the real world* I don't really believe in this premise [since a background in science helps people understand the world, history helps people be responsible citizens, and writing is useful in every job], but regardless, the topic asks my opponent to argue in favor of *learning.* If half the things we *learn* are not useful in the real world, my opponent loses. I argue above that grades help us learn a *process* for learning and help us to learn how to be *extrinsically motivated.* To the extent my opponent is right - that we forget half what we learn - this just proves why the Pro side in today's debate should lose: because *learning* is temporary, but grades have longer term benefits. Grades are a badge of honor that can help you get a good job or graduate school placement years later. And grades help you learn a process that will always be useful to you. 3) *People just memorize to get high test scores* I have two responses to this. First, not every class is susceptible to memorization tests. English classes are often graded based on essay assignments. And some classes *require* memorization. It is impossible to learn chemistry without memorizing which compounds react with which other compounds. It is impossible to learn biology with memorizing some of the basic nomenclature and biological structures. Some basic background knowledge is required in every course that at some point needs to be memorized. We probably all know our multiplication tables by heart by now. But at some time, we all had to memorize multiplication. It is a faulty premise to state that "everything that is the result of memorization is useless knowledge." Second, straight memorization tests are evidence of a bad teacher, not evidence that grading is bad. It is possible to re-design the test so that it requires more critical thinking. For example, my AP US History course had tests that were primarily essay-based, to mirror the AP exam. While my teacher *could have* simply asked us to recite facts and dates we had memorized, instead he required us to perform our own original analysis of history, in light of those facts and circumstances. In so requiring, I became a better writer. Without the incentive of grades, I would not have been motivated to work as hard for that class. Conclusion: memorization sometimes has its place as a valid learning tool. To the extent that it is overused in the classroom, that is the teacher's fault. Memorization is not inherent to "learning" or to "grading." Lastly, extend all my dropped arguments. 1. Grades provide key feedback to students that help with learning a *process* and with *course correction,* so that students whose own subjective judgment about how much they have learned is *wrong* can correct course and study harder. 2. Grades are an important signal to others. Colleges would lose a key predictive tool if grades were not allowed and a more subjective measurement of "learning" were used. Employers would have no idea who to hire. Students who worked really hard in high school and college would not be rewarded for that effort. Students who interview well, but got terrible grades and will be lazy workers, will steal jobs from people who would have normally been straight A students. 3. Grades an important motivator. Students have less of an incentive to learn and work hard without grades. Grades help teach extrinsic motivation, which is an important source of motivation in our society. 4. Grades prepare students for outcome-based measurement systems that are used in every meritocracy system in our society. Without grades, students will be shocked when something more is expected than them than simply a subjective sense that they are "learning." 5. It is impossible to talk about "learning" without grades. I defined grades very broadly to include any form of measuring student performance, which could include letter grades (A, B, C, D, F), some other grading system (High Pass, Pass, Low Pass [like at Harvard Law School]), or a qualitative ranking system, where teachers rank student performance based on a totality of circumstances. Without measuring "learning," how could we even talk about learning? Without grades, to answer George W. Bush's question - "Is our children learning?" - the answer would be, "We have no idea, let's hope so." [1] http://cshe.berkeley.edu...