Grades. I hate them, and you probably do too. With the first quarter coming to an end, many students are probably panicking over some grade in some class or many grades in many classes.

From elementary school to high school, grades have added lots of unnecessary stress to my life. I say unnecessary, because I think grades are an unnecessary thing.

To understand how absurd grades are, first answer this question. What is the purpose of school? Many would say that its purpose is to let students learn. Learning should be the primary concern of any student who attends school.

But when you ask any student to list their top stressors, I’m sure grades will have precedence over learning on their list. The importance of good grades that has been stressed by parents and teachers alike is distracting students from the real reason they go to school, to learn.

Some say that grades are a good way to measure how well a student is learning in a class, but I think they are just a way to tell how hard a person is willing to work.

Take the commonly used letter grading system where a letter corresponds to a range of percentages. If I have an average of 92 percent for the quarter and get the greatly desired letter grade of A, does that mean I’ve learned 92 percent of the information covered in that class? No. In all likelihood I probably learned all of the most important points of the course but some technicality stopped me from getting a higher percentage.

Even though I think present grading systems are flawed, I can’t think of a different grading system that can take into account the amount of learning a student does. I suppose I will have to wait until a genius comes along and succeeds in improving the grading system in most schools. Either that, or I could cryogenically freeze myself and wake up when the Learn-o-Meter is invented. I could probably learn a lot from the people of the future.