It's time to get rid of grades.
Our school doesn't give grades. Here's why:
Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and asking your child to clean their room. They dutifully perform each of the necessary tasks to the best of their ability: lining their books up on the shelf, making their bed, and sorting their clothes. They vacuum the rug and even wash the window for good measure.
Then, when they’re finished, you march in with a rubric and look around.
Why haven’t the books been alphabetized? Why aren’t the pillows perfectly centered on the bed? For goodness’ sake, you told them to clean their room.
But they made a solid effort. You look down at your rubric and scribble a B+.
Okay, seriously — how absurd would it be to give your kid a letter grade for cleaning their room?! You would never. Your child doesn’t need a grade; they need actual feedback. And they don’t need to be perfect.
Traditional grading systems have been around for centuries, even though studies have proven that points-based grading:
Undermines learning and creativity
Rewards cheating
Damages peer relationships
Encourages avoidance of challenging work
Teaches students to value grades over knowledge
We expect a final grade at the end of the year to represent the full culmination of a child’s understanding of a subject. But how do we measure the effort they put in, the attitude they had toward their learning, and the growth they experienced over the term?
Because grades can’t provide that whole picture of learning, they usually just tell us a small portion of it, like whether a student aced each of their tests and did all of their homework. Not whether they truly mastered the content, not how their understanding grew and changed over time, not whether they learned from their mistakes.
So, why do schools continue to emphasize the importance of good grades? And what’s the alternative?
At Guidepost, we don’t use grades. Instead, we use assessments and mastery-based learning. Students learn at their own pace and actively evaluate their own work. Their education is tailored to them, and “mastery” is clearly defined, enabling them to advance as they’re ready.
Rather than emphasizing good grades, we work with our students to hone their individual knowledge and skills.
Because kids don’t need grades to learn. In fact, without a points-based grading system, children learn more — and they enjoy learning more, too.
Here’s how it works:
Grades don’t motivate real learning
We think that grades are a motivator (if you want an A+, you have to study hard!), but grades actually make kids less motivated to truly learn.
Grades are divorced from the innate human desire to get to the bottom of things — our inherent drive to discover the truth. When we’re motivated to learn, we don’t need to chase an A+ because knowledge is its own reward.
“The pursuit of truth, the desire to be right — not in right in a debate, but right with the world — are powerful motives in themselves. The mind wants to know, and this desire to know should be pushed, protected, and cultivated.”
But when grades are the only motivator, kids are more likely to use methods like cramming or rote memorization to hack their way through it — because it’s the fastest, easiest path to an A+.
When grades are off the table, however, kids become the type of people who aren’t willing to accept what they’re told. They want to know it for themselves. They won’t be satisfied until they understand why something is the way it is.
And their resulting understanding will be deeper; they won’t forget everything they learned as soon as the unit test is over. In other words, they will have mastered the content.
If a school without GPAs makes you nervous, we get it. Grades have taken on such an air of importance because our system rewards surface-level perfection, not real understanding.
Straight A’s don’t necessarily mean that your child has truly mastered the content of their lessons. They could also mean that your kid is good at cramming before an exam, or at using the language they know their teachers want to see in their essays.
In other words, they’re good at doing what the system rewards.
Grades put a ceiling on achievement
Think about it: your child knows how to earn a perfect grade — but do they know how to put in the effort to learn?
If the ultimate goal is to earn an A grade, your kid doesn’t need to take challenging courses that stretch their mind. It makes more sense to take an easier class where they won’t risk getting a B.
In this way, grades actually disincentivize effort.
Moreover, if a student struggles in class, works hard, and eventually masters the material, their GPA won’t reflect that achievement. Their report card will still look mediocre compared to a student who started by understanding most of the curriculum and hardly worked to reach the point of mastery.
This is how grades decouple effort from reward. Kids focus so much on the A+ that they lose sight of the actual goal, which is to learn.
A mastery-based system, on the other hand, supports ambition, encourages students to challenge themselves and take risks, and honors and respects the child who improves through sustained effort and hard work.
High standards without grades
But, without grades, how will you know if your kid is doing well in school?
In our experience, when your children are truly learning and mastering their lessons, you get to witness their growth in tangible ways. This might look like:
Your toddler picking up a book and reading it on their own
Your elementary schooler regaling you with details about their science project
Your teenager turning their creative idea into a profitable business
Ultimately, when a child is doing well in school, you’ll notice it — how they’re proud of their work, how they’re learning and improving, and how they’re gaining skills and knowledge that are already leading to success in the real world.
There are other ways to tell how kids are doing, too — mainly via clear, communicated standards that are backed up with regular assessments.
Because yes, kids should still be assessed. Assessment is the process of making a judgment about a student’s development or learning objective, and it is important. This is because:
Assessment helps identify gaps in understanding and can guide future studies.
Self-assessment builds an internal editor that enables a student to produce excellent work without a grade book.
Peer assessment creates a culture of striving for growth that is based on mutual respect, trust, and support.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with testing. What matters most is why a test is being used in the first place.
We use tests to ensure students understand the content of their lessons and identify areas of confusion.
But tests are just one piece of data amongst many.
We also use progress reports, student-led conferences, and an online portfolio where parents can see the type and quality of work that their children are doing in class.
Ultimately, we hold our students to high standards, support them in meeting those standards, and help them become their most effective editors. All of these are essential to building student agency.
The long game approach to education
One of our favorite things about Montessori materials — the kind we use in our schools — is that many of them are self-correcting. The Cylinder Blocks, for instance, make it easy for children to determine whether each block fits correctly in its chosen place.
“The normal role of the teacher is to make observations and offer corrections… The better approach, [Montessori] thought, is to put the child in a position where she can correct herself. If she can immediately notice her mistakes on her own, she won’t shy away from them…” says Matt.
This is how we teach kids to view failure as a necessary part of growth.
Grades teach kids to shoot for the 100%, the A+, the 4.0 — and to beat themselves up when they fall short (as we all do at times).
But it’s not their GPAs that will carry them into adulthood — it’s their capacity to learn new things (which means failing a lot).
“Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were famous life-long tinkerers, who discovered new ways of doing things by constantly improvising, experimenting, failing, and retesting,” writes Peter Sims. “Above all they were voraciously inquisitive learners.”
Kids need space to experiment, fail, and change their minds.
Which is exactly why Guidepost schools don’t give students grades.
Instead, we give them clear objectives, individualized support, and the opportunity to truly master their lessons — and they do.
This is how we help raise humans who aren’t afraid to fail, who aren’t afraid to be wrong, and who believe it’s more important to put in real effort than to be perfect.
☀️ This week’s bright spots:
If you have 1 minute…
Check out this chart of all the various forms of risky play that the Canadian Pediatrics Association recommends for children.
If you have 5 minutes…
Read our blog post on the materials we use in our classrooms to prepare kids to read and write.
If you have 10 minutes…
Read this piece by Peter H. Diamandis on parenting as an entrepreneur.
Great post. Keep up the excellent blog.