My Practice Essay: A Through F

I've been trying to gear up for my certification tests lately, taking many practice tests and trying to fill in the cracks in my academic knowledge which have developed (primarily in MATH) since I graduated.

In an attempt to create as realistic a testing scenario as possible, I wrote this essay for the practice test today.

PROMPT:
“Because the traditional grading scale of A through F fosters needless competition and pressure, colleges and universities should use a simple pass/fail system.”

ESSAY:
As the American school system struggles to regain a foothold as a top-rated educational system among the developed nations, it can be tempting to try brash tactics that attempt to wipe out the status quo rather than repair it and improve its productivity. Removing the traditional A through F grading scale would in the long run be detrimental to American students, and fails to address the larger issues which cause needless competition and pressure: lack of individual attention, compounded by an obsession with knowledge assessment over learning skills.

Removing the grading system will not increase the number of teachers per student, a ratio which other countries have raised each year and which the United States continues to drop each year as state education departments treat local school districts as an easy source of funding, pinching teacher pay and instituting hiring freezes to allow administrators at the district and state level to continue to receive raises and/or hire new administrators for positions which seem conjured out of thin air as teachers on the ground are forced to seek employment elsewhere. In this rigged system, students aren’t so much competing with each other for higher grades as they are competing for attention by their instructors, and our educational system favors those whose natural learning styles are reading, writing, and verbal, to the exclusion of all other learning styles, especially kinetic. And their teachers have zero freedom to attempt to reach out with other styles of instruction because they are so hampered by standardized assessments.

Which leads to the other cause of needless student pressure: our system’s obsession with standardized testing. A written test only allows those students who naturally learn best through reading and writing to excel, though in our current system of too-much-too-early, even those rare individuals struggle to vomit the massive load of information that has been crammed into their skulls. Standardized testing paralyzes our underpaid, overworked educators from being able to experiment with teaching or content, or to creatively engage their students. If they want their students to pass, they and their students must conform to the standardized system, and far too many cannot. By basing our entire educational system around standardized testing, we are stifling the best resources an education should provide: critical thinking and creativity. Both in our teachers and our students.

Thus, the A through F grading system is not the problem, nor has it led to our current set of problems. Not enough teachers and too many tests has led us here, and we cannot move on as a nation and join the rest of the developed world until we do so.