In the midst of finals season, I am grinding for my finals, locking myself in my room to do practice test after practice test. What is this all for? How much studying is “enough” studying? When will I ever feel like I mastered the material enough to be confident that I will do well on my finals?
One of the most obvious ways to measure your learning and mastery of a certain topic is through tests and grades. Ever since elementary school through middle school and high school, getting good grades have been the ultimate goal and having good grades meant receiving opportunities and praise. But are grades and tests really a good measure of your learning? In some aspects, grades and tests have reduced my passion in learning, instead of providing motivation and drive. Maybe you’re having a bad day on test day and you get a lower score than usual. Does that mean you didn’t master the material enough to overcome the effects of a bad day? Maybe the test asks tricky questions on specific topics you didn’t have time to review and you get a B in the class. Does that mean that your overall understanding of the class material is quantified by the B? Maybe you made some arithmetic errors and the mistake propagated into other parts of the question. Does that mean that you don’t understand the core concepts of the class material? I hope that the answers to all of these questions are an obvious “no.” But the concept of grading is so ingrained in our education system that we’ve associated learning with grades.
My goal is to revitalize my love for learning and disassociate it with the concept of grades. You can feel accomplished in a class that you struggled a lot in and maybe didn’t get an ideal grade. You can get a B or C or less in a class but still feel proud that you’ve learned a lot. Maybe learning, like happiness or success, can’t be measured through numbers. So what if we measured it through experiences? I took a Distributed Systems class this semester and depending on how the final goes, I may or may not come out of this class with an A. But I don’t want a B or a C undermining my accomplishments and hard word throughout the semester. Instead, a better measure of my mastery of the content might be my ability to explain how a distributed system works or my ability to apply the systems I learned about in my future job. These are more qualitative measures and it definitely still feels unusual to think about progress in this way. I am still exploring other ways to measure my learning so I would love if other people had other ideas on ways that they evaluate their learning and mastery.