Grades and happiness

In july 2009, New York Times best-selling author Dan Pink gave a TED Talk “on the surprising science of motivation” about internal and external motivation. Using 50 years of behavioral science and economics, he explained that giving people the freedom to pursue their interests leads to incredible creativity and innovative solutions. In contrast, externally motivating people through incentives such as bonuses or deadlines — or, I would add, grades — results in pressure, narrow-mindedness and mediocre solutions. Pink’s talk — and book by a similar title — is focused on the workplace and gives examples of creative companies such as Google. But I would extend his ideas to school and, ultimately, to life.

At Princeton, we are used to obligations and external motivators. We want to get good grades, be accepted into the best medical, law and graduate schools and land the best jobs. These desires may be buoyed to some degree by internal motivations, such as the desire to get into a good medical school so that you can pursue your dream of becoming a doctor. However, our primary focus is on the immediate result, which typically is an external motivator. This is logical — it makes sense to take things one step at a time, to focus on what you have control of at that moment. We all have deadlines to meet.

Indeed, it is probably impossible to completely eliminate external motivation. External motivators, such as the desire to pay your bills on time, are part of life. High achievers are likely to place additional pressure on themselves to do well. But if external motivation is the enemy of creativity, as Pink says, then it is the enemy of education as well. If this is the case, then the University should not be adding systematic external motivation.

I am speaking, of course, about grades. Specifically, grade deflation. I know, I know, this is a well-trodden topic. However, my complaint is not that we are less competitive when compared to our Harvard peers. My complaint is not even that grade deflation is unfair. Rather, my argument is that the competitive atmosphere created by grades — and grade deflation in particular — is antithetical to education. My proposal is not to merely eliminate grade deflation, but to eliminate grades altogether.

This may appear to be a radical statement and is likely not one the administration would like to consider. But studies have shown that students from kindergarten through graduate school are less interested in learning if they are graded and that grades turn learning into a chore. Some studies have even shown that grade orientation and a learning orientation are inversely related. And, while grading is the norm, not all schools follow this model. For example, alternative school systems such as Montessori and Waldorf provide teacher feedback but no grades. St. Ann’s is a private K-12 school in Brooklyn that eliminated grading 45 years ago and sends a large portion of graduates to Ivy League schools. Colleges that provide written evaluations rather than grades include Hampshire College, Antioch University and New College of Florida.

I do not claim to have thought about every variable exhaustively or to have weighed all the trade-offs. Written evaluations are less convenient and require smaller classes. It is possible that not having grades might disadvantage us when applying to selective jobs or to medical, law and graduate schools. But, given the evidence against grading, I think eliminating grades is something students, professors and administrators should discuss.

If Princeton’s mission is education, not vocational training, as the University claims, then it should be striving to provide the best education and to produce the best thinkers as possible. Instead, grades and grade deflation motivate us to focus on results rather than the process. We pressure ourselves to read 200 pages so that we can regurgitate it in precept or on an exam, not so that we can learn. We cram the night before to ace — or at least pass — a test, but we forget everything we studied when we leave the exam room.

Princeton encourages us to be competitive and to be the best rather than to work in teams. It encourages us to memorize rather than to learn. It encourages us to seek a grade and a post-graduation goal rather than to think. It encourages a blindingly fast pace so that we can attempt to cross everything off our impossibly long to-do list without thought. If we are to be leaders, as President Tilghman tells us we will be, we need to be able to think and come up with creative solutions, not to regurgitate. But, more importantly, if we are to be happy, we must live a life based on internal motivation. At the end of the day, it is internal motivation that gives us a sense of purpose, contentment and accomplishment.

To some extent this is psychological, and there certainly are some individuals who are better at maintaining internal motivation than others. We all have internal motivations of some type — ultimately our goals at Princeton and beyond were formed from internal motivations. But it is easy to lose sight of these motivations in the pressure-filled, externally-motivated world of Princeton. I applaud those who are able to maintain their sense of internal motivation despite Princeton’s stressful environment. But there is only so much an individual can do given the environment in which he lives. I call upon the University to create an environment more conducive to education and creative thinking and that helps us to follow our own desires and goals.

Miriam Geronimus is an ecology and evolutionary biology major from Ann Arbor, Mich. She can be reached at mgeronim@princeton.edu.