Madeleine Greene, MCAS ’24, is a self-confessed grade obsessor.
“I’ve always been very obsessed with grades and professor validation,” Greene said. “I’m struggling to think of a measure of success that isn’t grades.”
Greene is not the only Boston College student who feels this way. With an acceptance rate of 14.7 percent, being an over-achiever is practically a requirement on the Heights. Oftentimes, this high-ambition mentality means students are motivated by external pressures like grades and future careers.
Like Greene, Sarah Meyler, MCAS ’27, said she is also largely motivated by grades. This pressure, Meyler said, comes from stress surrounding post-graduate plans.
“I find myself focusing on careers and doing research of what grades I need to get and extracurriculars I should be involved in so that I can have a successful career and life later on,” Meyler said.
These extrinsic motivations of grades and careers are internalized by students, leading them to what BC history professor Sylvia Sellers-Garcia calls unhealthy and unproductive motivations.
“There’s a kind of terror I have seen,” said Sellers-Garcia. “So [I’m] focusing as much as possible on helping students. Putting aside some of the more perilous motivations and treating learning seriously as one of the motivations is the best way to do one of the things that Boston College says at the school, which is to encourage a life of learning.”
At Boston College, however, grades are the standard method of evaluating course success. The Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) believes the current grading system can lead professors to justify themselves rather than provide meaningful feedback. To address the issue, they created a cohort of BC faculty to discuss ways of making grading more equitable.
The professors within the cohort come from various disciplines and departments at BC, combining a variety of different methods and goals when it comes to grading.
Sellers-Garcia is one of the professors in this cohort. She said she attempted to tackle this challenge by grading all of the assignments in one of her classes as either complete or incomplete.
“When you give someone a grade, they tend to focus on the grade rather than the learning,” said Sellers-Garcia. “We’re in the business of learning, or teaching. We should be focusing on the teaching rather than the grade giving.”
Grades should not come at the sacrifice of students’ mental health, Sellers-Garcia said. But unfortunately, the current system perpetuates this narrative, she added.
“I am not sure what we think grades are accomplishing that makes it worthwhile to induce that level of anxiety about them,” said Sellers-Garcia.
Though the current grading system is flawed, Sellers-Garcia said she doesn’t know of an alternative that could replace it—grades are the backbone of academic evaluation. She does believe, however, that it’s possible to create a world where students don’t base their self-worth off of something as simple as a grade.
“I think it will require a lot of changes,” Sellers-Garcia said. “When you grow up in a system that has grades, you come to accommodate it and find it totally normal and acceptable.”
Unlike Sellers-Garcia, history professor Eric Grube teaches history core classes, which draw many students without prior interest in the humanities. For him, the challenge is to keep students engaged, but not strictly interested in grades, even when further learning in the subject is not required.
“[Core classes] do lead to a bit of a scattered audience, a diverse audience in terms of skill sets and level of engagement,” Grube said. “Grades are probably, generally, the motivating factors for the class. I would say freshmen are more likely to exhibit some more kind of curiosity.”
Grube said he has seen students show genuine interest in subjects like history, English, or philosophy, but feel they cannot pursue it beyond college because it will distract them from other lofty goals.
“It’s the fault of the creation of a perception of artificially high stakes for everything,” Grube said.
On the other hand, Grube said he has observed students who do not want to explore the core because of a strictly career-focused path.
“It makes sense, especially with the tuition,” said Grube. “But I think it’s a little sad because it kind of cuts out room for curiosity and exploration.”
While the humanities can allow more room for subjectivity in grading, STEM classes tend to have more specific grading systems, according to biology professor Babak Momeni.
Momeni said he notices his students put an unhealthy amount of pressure on themselves to get good grades, but within his area of teaching, there aren’t many unconventional ways to grade students that are still effective.
“It’s hard to design tests and evaluations that are both comprehensive and also in detail,” said Momeni of his microbiology exams.
For Momeni, the central conflict is that education relies on extensive memorization, sometimes at the loss of true learning, but a system with less clear measures and focus on performance might come at the loss of motivation.
“I’m conflicted because there is this stress from the grading and they think truthfully that it will affect their future career,” said Momeni. “But the same stress is also the motivator for them to pay more attention to produce better results.”
Students looking to go to graduate schools face a particular amount of stress relating to undergraduate performance. When gauging their chances for post-graduate opportunities, grades are the key player in future opportunities.
“I find myself focusing on my grades more often considering I’m pre-health and want to go to optometry school,” said Noelle Bruce, MCAS ’25. “I think about this pretty often, especially as I’m heading into my senior year. Sometimes it’s productive but a lot of times it causes a ton of anxiety considering how unsure the future is.”
There is a culture of being “BC perfect” on the Heights, Sellers-Garica said, where BC students think they need certain grades, certain extracurricular activities, and certain job or grad school opportunities after graduating.
“I think nobody’s perfect and everybody understands that,” Momeni said. “But I think the perception that there is an expectation from the students to be perfect. They think that’s realistic.”
Though the current pressure around grades is not healthy, Meyler and Greene both said it keeps them motivated. Professors, such as Sellers-Garcia, are then tasked with evaluating whether or not learning can exist without external motivations. Many students and professors would like to see a world where it can, Grube said.
“If the only motivation is that external validation of grades or professors’ kudos or a job or an internship once that’s achieved, the learning stops right there,” Grube said.
Sellers-Garcia said her main goal as a professor is to encourage students to enjoy learning, not stress about numerical measures of success. Though implementing this goal requires some creativity, Sellers-Garcia believes it is a good starting point.
“I don’t think it’s our job to produce workers for the economy,” said Sellers-Garcia. “I think my job as a teacher is to teach. It’s about learning. The economy can figure itself out later.”
