Classes and grades

In graduate school, you're no longer supposed to worry about grades. People were kept in this cycle of worrying about their grades as undergraduates because if they applied to graduate schools they needed to impress--it was like college admissions all over again.

(This was especially true of pre-med students--I knew several who spent hundreds of hours volunteering with organizations they didn't care much about, or who decided to major in something sort of bio-related but sort of quirky, based on the hope that their applications would stand out and give them an edge in admissions. I readily admit to doing this sort of thing when I was in high school, but now that I have a little more perspective I can appreciate how silly all of this was.)

To impress upon us new graduate students the worthlessness of grades, pretty much everyone gets an A or a B. Students who do really poorly might get a C, which is considered a failing grade. But it's kind of funny how graduate schools are upfront about the fact that they're going to inflate everyone's grades so that we know they are meaningless. I appreciate it. (I wouldn't mind doing away with grades altogether, but that's a topic for another post.)

Despite our professors explicitly telling us that this is graduate school and we needn't be concerned with our grades, there has still been plenty of chatter about them. For example, after the quizzes for one class were returned there were groups of students who immediately complained to one another--this looked like a scene right out of my undergraduate organic chemistry classes--about how the quiz assessed too narrow a range of the material, the grading was too harsh, the concepts weren't properly explained, etc. These may have all been valid criticisms of the format of the class and the quiz. But it appeared to me that they were grounded in dissatisfaction with a low grade, which really no longer matters. I wonder if this will continue or if we will learn to relax when it comes to grades as the year goes on.