Is grading system in education useful or useless?

Answer 1

Assuming that you mean high school grading in the U.S, I would say as a student that it is not perfect but is effective. Most schools assign grades on an A B C D F scale with each letter corresponding with about a 10% range in grades, starting with A at 90%-100%. The points work on either a raw score or a weighted average. The grades are typically not graded on a bell curve either, so grade inflation is a problem in some cases. This general system is traditional and effective mostly as a comparison of progress or effort.

Unfortunately, it does not actually make much intuitive sense and it does not take a very realistic approach to learning. The main problem is that it works by grading students based primarily on points missed, on what they did wrong. In order to pass the class with a C grade, a student can miss at most roughly 30% of the points. A proficient B student is expected to only miss 20%, an A student under 10%. Students are not really awarded for what they have done well, as someone who understands 69% of the material would get a D and fail the entire class completely despite still knowing a majority. This mentality encourages students to not make mistakes, which is obviously different from a real-life learning process which shows that mistakes are in fact the best way to learn. In real life, we cannot simply decide to not make mistakes, so we focus instead on reducing the impact of mistakes and preventing them from occuring again once known. So in general, the I believe the system works but is really quite odd compared to that of many other nations that have learned from our system and improved it. Then again, the college grading system fixes these issues and is very effective.

Answer 2

It is useful in that there must be some standard by which a students academic performnce can be measured.