Grades are not everything

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that most of the parents are not happy with the grades their children bring
at the end of the year. What is more that some go to the extent of perfectionism and do not allow their
child to even blink an eye or take a second off the book to take some rest. Why do they do this after all?
Parents feel that their children need to work hard enough to score good grades because good grades
will guarantee them a fantastic future for sure and without which they will most probably be doomed.
However this hypothesis needs to be retested and here is why.

Let’s fast forward into the future for a while. Your child works hard and achieves the desired grades.
There is nothing that stops him from enrolling into his dream university. He gets an admission there and
earns a Bachelors or even a Master’s degree. He’s become an engineer or a doctor or may an IT
specialist. He acquires a job and now works dawn to dusk under an administration for the sake of one
thing –money. He’s so engrossed in his job that he forgets the importance of himself even, let alone that
of the world around him. What next? Is that it? No. He gets married and has children and then he
repeats the same thing with his children with the same assumptions as his parents. The cycle continues.

Is that what you are pushing your child for? Really? Is money the only goal? If so, then good grades are
not really important. Good grades are only and only important for those children have firmly believe in
themselves and that they need to tap their God-gifted potential to its fullest and do something
innovative or become researchers in the fields in which enough work has not been done yet they are
very important. This is why we need top more PhD doctors and top researchers. Mending money is a
different experience altogether that has to be learnt in a different way than learning at schools. Even
bad graders can earn and you should know how and why. Here are some facts and true stories laid down
which if are not convincing enough, nothing can be.

Notable inventors who performed poorly at schools

Look around yourself and see how many bulbs there are to illuminate your surroundings, especially at
night. Imagine there were no light bulbs and you were still to manage oil lit lamps, every time you would
need light in the dark. Were it not for the efforts of Thomas Edison, our lives wouldn’t be illuminated
and we had to live on dim lights or utter darkness. This scientist not only invented bulb, but also went on
to make around 1000 technical devices, and also pioneered motion picture. Did he do well at school?
Was he getting good grades? Well, no. On the contrary it is said that his teacher told his parents he was
poor at studying and had no future. He lost his hearing at an early age and had to face challenges as
such. Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, also had a hard time studying.

Many entrepreneurs dropped out

The new tech-devices which we have now in our hands all the time and some leading social media
platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, were created by people who could not complete their studies
properly. One had to drop out because they couldn’t afford, another felt he was bound to fail yet
another purposefully left college determined to focus on his project as he could listen to his instincts
that dropping out and focusing on the project was a necessity for him to create such a platform that
nearly everybody on this planet would use. Behind some success stories even though drop-outs, are the
names of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.
 Others even after big degrees with high grades are wandering jobless

There are numerous examples of people who after completing their graduation in Engineering field or in
Biological fields and even PhDs, wander about finding jobs that do not match a bit of their educational
experience, thus deeming their degrees worthless. One can argue that there are some basic
communication skills that matter or that one has to struggle and exert enough even after completing the
degree to find a compatible job, like for example Elon Musk, one of the leading tech giants today, says
there was a time he couldn’t afford an apartment and had to sleep on his office sofa instead, where he
began his business. Well, arguments as such prove that it is the conceptual knowledge, skills, discipline,
intellectual proficiency and the God-gifted intelligence after all that decides one’s future, and it’s not the
degrees! You can learn from people, from books and from experience without attaining a degree. A man
from Karachi, Pakistan studied aeronautical engineering abroad in China and came back only to see that
he would not be selected for any job despite fulfilling gazillion formalities. And guess what, he began to
sell Watermelon Juice instead. -_- . God know what went wrong with him, but certainly the degree
didn’t do any good to him as all this hard work at school and university was not meant for becoming a
fruit ninja.

Communication skills and socialization also or more important

Communication skill is certainly a key to finding a job or even to setting a business. It is well understood
if you behave in an abhorrent way who would want to take you as an employee in his firm or how would
you attract customers if you set a business? To know where you need to show leniency and where you
need to be firm and strict, without crossing the lines of ethics is certainly the skill you need before you
exit the university and enter the practical field. Rabea Ataya, the CEO of Bayt.com which is a leading
website for finding jobs in the Middle East, says after an extensive research that after wars and certain
dark period in his country Lebanon, there was kind of depression in the job market and people were
wandering jobless despite being qualified and having earned big degrees. He said that was, as his
researches proved, due to the lack of proper way of communication whether one to one or through
documents. He said there was a huge job potential whilst the rumor that there were less or no jobs
diminished people’s interest and confidence. And thus he had to bridge the gap between compatible
employers and employees by creating the website, where he’s given a pattern, which works.

Grades are not IQ tests

IQ stands for ‘intelligence quotient’ which basically is a ratio of one’s mental age to his physical age.
Scientifically and psychologically speaking, intelligence can be defined as the ability of how better one
can solve a certain problem with his acquired experience. By this definition, a fair test of intelligence
must establish certain standards for the candidates. You will have to see for every candidate that the
acquired experience they have has to be the same, factors affecting their ability to give the test must be
the same and that is far from the standards set in for examinations. A rough idea of intelligence can
indeed be taken from the grades because it shows a comparative result of how better a student
performed as compared to the other fellows who fall in the same age group. But the thing is different
factors affect the performance of students when they are giving the exam. Intelligence is a wider
concept, but grades depend on things as how much one has learnt things by heart and how well he has
understood the concept, and finally that how well he put it down onto the paper.
 Grades can be unfair representations

Affected by many factors, such as illness on exam day and numerous practices, ranging from cheating to
even bribing in some cases, grading system is not reliable anymore. But there is something more to it.
Even if these things are not present, an element of injustice will still be there. Say for example there is a
history exam and students have to prepare sixteen chapters. One student prepares random chapters
which he deems as most important or which some teachers predicted in guess papers while the other
student works hard on understanding how and when such and such events developed in the past and
also memorizes the dates but unfortunately he couldn’t prepare the entire syllabus. He has gone
through most but it turns out that the chapters he did not prepare well were where the questions were
taken from. Another factor includes the way of expression and even disabilities like slow handwriting
speed with which psychological issues go parallel. We have a story of one of our schoolmates who would
fluently give correct answers to the questions when asked from the syllabus because he would study
hard. But sadly, whenever tests or assessments would come, he could not score beyond even sixty
percent due to low handwriting speed. Even though he was given extra time in the finals, he could not
sit there in the examination hall all alone due to psychological pressure and left things incomplete. And
there you go, an A grader gets a D. -_-

Another student recounts that he was very good at Mathematics, like basically he was an A star student,
yet he got grade B for Math in the finals for he could not reach to the hall in time for some reason.
Another one was good at knowledge of IGSCE Islamic Studies but bad at expression. Another student
prepared for certain language paper at school, who according to school standards set in tests and
assessments, got excellent grades but in the finals he got way less, that show certainly the examiner had
slightly different standards for checking, so here is another factor that affects the grades- the
subjectivity of the examiner in non-objective (not MCQ like) papers. Some students are well prepared
but they get ill on or around the day of exam, or something unexpected happens. A girl who was A star
students overall had to unfortunately experience her mother’s funeral like a week before exam, and so,
her score graph went down. There are many more stories to add but wouldn’t these be enough to ask
yourself as a parent pushing your child for super excellent grades, most often with no compromise, that
what are we pushing our children for? What on earth the grades represent about the students after all?
We are not saying that grades are always unfair but if you get the point of this paragraph you can infer
without doubt, they are, in many cases, unfair.

At schools when we prepare for the final exams, we have tests limited by time and that is what we are
being prepared for- how better we perform within certain time limit. These limits can be sometimes
psychologically demanding for students and they couldn’t control adrenaline rush affecting their recall
power. Adrenaline stimulates heart rate and blood flows more to every muscle except the brain. As a
result the creative part of the brain where critical thinking is controlled, functions less efficiently. Grades
depend on such school tests. They are essentially tests of speed and not that of your potential
performance. And that is what the grade reflects-speed.

Can be unfairly given

Let alone the problems with grading system itself, there are accounts of grades being given unjustly.
Instructors at universities, due to some references with or having certain illegal and awful deals with
students, have done a lot of damage to the system. After all grading is in the hands of the examiner, and
unless the examiner is a disciplined person of responsibility, whoever influences him will get his grades
amended. What is more that we tend to follow the trends rather than doing research ourselves. Around
the world we have lots of good universities, with state-of-the-art facilities that have not reached the
level of fame certain universities have reached luckily. America IVY league universities are so glamorized
that some rich businesspersons and affluent artists bribed, yes, BRIBED, authorities to get their children
with average grades admitted in “top notch” universities. So what are these grades for after all? Those
having high grades were more worthy to secure the seats in the Uni but that is what happened.

In a nutshell,

Parents should take some time off their work to reflect upon what they want their child to be and
should see what are the alternative options available if things didn’t proceed as their wished. Students
should think alike. Sometimes they set no Plan Bs and get depressed if they don’t attain desired grades.
No, not like that, it’s not the end of the world, there are numerous ways where your true potential can
be tapped, work hard finding them ways out rather than working for supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
grades. Again there should be plan Bs. There should be a realistic working done upon it. Grades are
indeed assets. They do have value but they are the means and not the ends. If your child brings
unexpected grades back home doesn’t mean he brought bad omen to the house. There would be better
options waiting for us but we need to realize we should come out of the fantasy into the real world and
act realistically, work hard on finding them out and then more opportunities will come forth.