Put a grade on it

So it occurred to me: We cannot waste this wellspring of industriousness on academics alone. Why not harness the motivating power of grades and apply them to other aspects of our lives? By doing so, we would become not only better students, but better friends, homemakers and lovers.

Many people struggle with fitness and body image, a claim borne out by the multitudes of New Year’s Resolutionists who flood gyms across the country. At any given time, one in three women and one in five men are on diets of one sort or another. There’s no question we want to improve ourselves but sometimes lack the motivation to do so. Letter grades could potentially provide that extra “oomph” to get us off the couch and onto the towpath. Can only swim half a mile? We’ll give you seven out of 10 for that. Skipped going to the gym twice last week? Looks like someone’s getting a C+ for participation. Since extrinsic motivation works so well for academics, imagine what it would do for our muscles!

And let’s not forget cleanliness. What employer or graduate school is going to want a slob in its ranks? Giving points for made beds and clean floors would give tremendous incentive to keep your abode squeaky clean. The midterm could even consist of dumping students in T.I. after a Saturday night and seeing which one achieved spotlessness the fastest (this would, of course, be curved). And that leftover pizza from that study break you forgot under your couch for four weeks? Boom. I know Princeton doesn’t like failing people, but someone might be looking at summer school.

Naturally, there are more important areas of our lives than sanitation and academics. What could be more important than family? They say that a good family is the foundation for a good life, so why not factor familial relationships into GPA? When was the last time you talked to your parents? 2011? Man, you’d better get on that if you have any hope of making it into graduate school. Calling siblings on birthdays would be mandatory. You could even score some extra credit by sending them a card! Imagine how much closer families would grow if their interactions, much like our exams, were weighted and scored.

Last but not least, Princeton romance could always use a leg up. How many potential relationships have been over before they ever began on account of someone staying in to finish a paper? Attaching grades to quantity of hook-ups, length of relationships or even sexual performance could vastly improve the love lives of our undergraduates. If intrinsic motivation isn’t enough, we need to promote action among the student body, not only for their sakes, but for the sakes of future Princetonians. After all, everyone’s heard of alumni’s remarkable propensity for interbreeding.

Adding these metrics to our lives would not only help undergraduates by spurring them on in areas that are arguably as important, if not more, than academics. It would also be hugely beneficial to institutions looking to vet applicants for their programs and positions. As an admissions officer at a medical school, am I going to want to take a candidate who aced his MCATs and boasted a hefty 4.0 academic GPA if he’s received a D+ in Interpersonal Communication? What good would a valedictorian do me at a law school if I know he’ll be miserable as a result of bad marks in Long-Distance Friendship Maintenance? These institutions would be able to make far more informed decisions given all of the highly relevant and rigorous data supplied by this new holistic GPA.

But perhaps I, in my gusto over the profound influence of grades on student behavior, am missing something. Perhaps things like family, friends and lovers don’t receive grades because they are so integral to achieving fulfillment and happiness that everyone seeks them anyway. If we want to get anything out of school, life or love, we need to define success in our own terms.

Could it be that, by assigning numerical credit to aspects of our lives, we both lessen their innate value in our own minds while simultaneously whoring out our own time and energy to satiate perceived external demands? By asserting that academics should be graded, are we not insulting them by insinuating that they aren’t interesting or compelling enough in their own right to merit our efforts? Maybe I’d have more time to think about these questions if it’d help my GPA, but for now I’ve got to go work on that problem set. Everyone knows you’re only as good as your transcript!