Education is a powerful tool to have. Education opens opportunities to more jobs with a degree. Most people achieve a good education and find themselves on a good career path. The question remains: does the education system really prepare people for their career? In the education system, instructors have many ways of grading their students upon completion of a course. The lettering grade system should be changed to something else, such as the Mastery Grading system or the Grading Scale system (Leary).
The system the United States uses mostly is the letter grading system to calculate students’ overall performances on the course and pass the students. There are many concerns on the letter grading system that isn’t effective at all, and it doesn’t help people identify what their skills are or what their weakness is to improve it for their career path.
Instructors believe the lettering grade system is effective to determine if a student passes a course or not. It’s not a very effective method at all. Students that work hard and do their assignments sometimes get a bad grade, then a student that doesn’t do their assignments achieves a better grade. Completion grades don’t determine whether the student understood the material or not; it’s stating they pass the course. It seems like many teachers ignore what students understand and focus on the grades to make them look better. According to Kohn, “He examines studies done on the impact of grading in the 1980s and 1990s which show that students interpret the emphasis on grading and marking as evidence that success matters more than learning and quality of thinking” (Kohn). Basically if instructors continue to use the lettering grade system to track a student’s progress, students will try to succeed in the course by finding ways to get a higher grade without learning the material well. Students tend to believe that once they achieve a good grade they know the material well and the instructor passes them. A letter...