As of December 2014, I finished my first semester of precalculus intermediate with a D+. Throughout the semester, my quarterly grades were composed of multiple 100-point quizzes and cumulative tests with a handful of one to five point homework checks in between the two. I choked; each quarter I received below 70s on these quizzes and tests and barely passed the homework checks.

Involved in a myriad of activities such as presiding over the CHS Model U.N. chapter, Charity Computer Building Club and booking a member of the U.S. Congress to visit the Nonpartisan Political Discussion Club I founded two years ago, I inevitably decided I was pouring more time into my clubs than I should have been. I never liked math personally, so I accepted I would always do badly, or in this case, absolutely horrible, no matter what. My grade was perpetually below 70 percent, and every time I visited my teacher, I was in  line for help. Failure to understand the curriculum invoked a domino effect; if I did not understand Section 2.1, I would not understand anything up to 4.8. I started to dramatically cut time from my extracurricular activities for precalculus. After all, it is a regular math class, so clearly with extra time I can succeed. I’d use this new time from mid-November onwards to relearn content from as far back as September in order to understand new content I was set to learn two periods later that same day. It was a start.

​It was not until one week later, where conveniently my three other classes had such minimal amounts of work that I could focus even more on precalculus than I was after the activities time cuts I made; and to my absolute shock, I landed an 82 percent on a quiz. But it was unfortunately after my self-celebratory dinner (I am not even joking about that) I realized there was no value to it anymore — sure, I had managed to finally learn what we were being taught, but I still had two Ds. It was December; I was on track for a low semester grade no matter what.

Did I do this badly because I just do not like math? Or am I just “bad” at it? No — my grade was so low as a result of multiple Ds on heavy 100-point assessments that I felt discouraged to relearn. Numerically, my grade was a lost cause — and the grade is all that colleges look at. There was no reason to try learning it anymore, because my grade would still give the impression that I am awful at it.

On the flip side, a close friend of mine who could not care less about government earned an A in AP Government. He too failed tests consecutively. But through a system as simple as test corrections, he received partial credit for taking the time out to reflect on why he got answers wrong and why the other answer was right. He patched his grade up just a small amount after the bad tests, and also indirectly prepared himself for the next.

This reinstated the value of understanding the content — what is the point of learning something if you know the letter grade that will drop in December will objectively say you didn’t learn it? Intrinsically, one could argue that we should all be kids who want to learn no matter what. However, there is an extrinsic pressure: the grades, the letters. If it is so low beyond recovery, it overpowers the intrinsic drive.

If we want to foster knowledge and understanding, we have to take off the extrinsic pressure of harsh, heavy and immutable grading. We must still maintain its aspects of accountability, but after tests, we ought to say, “Take some time to recover for your sake and your grade’s sake,” rather than “See you on the next one!”

Krishna Pathak has written a guest column for the HiLite. The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Krishna Pathak at [email protected].