Totally. My freshmen year of high school, I was in the gifted math class for Algebra II. I had actually taken Algebra II the year before in middle school but switched districts (ironically to try to have a more rigorous academic environment), using the same text book, and I received over a 100% in the class. In my high school class, homework was like 20% of the grade. Now, I was fourteen and going through a weird phase and sort of like, didn’t want to do my math homework. It was a waste of my time. It was pointless. I already knew the material. I was bored. The teacher knew this. She knew I knew the material and would frequently ask me to tutor other students. But I still had to do my homework, as pointless and devoid of meaning as it was. Because I was obstinate and going through a number of challenges with various medications for my ADHD and anxiety/depression, I pushed back. Because I couldn’t see why it mattered, especially when it was abundantly clear I had already mastered the material (and this was the gifted class — the honors or regular ed class would have had me doing Algebra I, which I took in sixth or seventh grade) and that homework was strictly performative.

So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C.

This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself?

So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time.

In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago.

The ultimate kicker was that the following year after the Algebra II disaster, the state changed the grade scale so the grade I received would have been a B. But the old grades were not retroactively recalculated.

There is a good argument to be made that minimum grades are a joke and an affront to teaching, but I would argue that grades in general are bullshit and frequently are not indicative of whether a person has mastered anything. There is a reason many of the best private (not to mention Montessori schools) don’t emphasize grades or tests. Equally, there is a reason that the Montessori and related methods doesn’t scale in the way that US public school systems need to scale.