Maybe you learn more from a C than from an A.

As a community of Yalies and more broadly as college students, many of us are outraged when we even hear rumors of a professor who gives out grades lower than some arbitrarily high threshold. Classes are discussed with grading as at least a significant, if not a primary, consideration. Often, anything below a B is seen as harsh and uncalled for.

In the quest for academic perfection, grades have gone from a standardized marker of progress and learning over time into a singular threshold differentiating only good and bad, nothing more.

But student entitlement alone cannot be held responsible for this redefinition. For at least the past few decades, parents, peers, college admissions advisors and the r/ApplyingToCollege subreddit have drilled into most of us that academic excellence necessitates top-of-the-line grades. Even an upward trend means you began without enough effort; similarly, fluctuations show a lack of consistency.

Once we get to college that mindset doesn’t go anywhere. And the increasing proportion of A grades at Yale — making up 78.97 percent of grades in the 2022-23 school year — means getting a C feels equally as much or more so like failure in college than in high school. 

Striving for excellence is a good thing at an academic institution. But the redefining of grades from a system to track progress to a binary switch — indicating success with an A and failure with anything else — eliminates their function as genuine educational tools. 

Ideally, grades should be feedback, working together with comments on an essay or problem set to provide a complete picture of a given student’s performance. Throughout our four years in an academically challenging program, we should accept and expect the occasional B or C because we are learning skills and content we did not already know. Someone who takes classes only in subjects they have already mastered can expect to get straight A’s. Everyone else, who came to Yale and presumably bought into its vision of liberal arts education expressly designed around exploration, should not.

As part of this function of grades as feedback, we should learn to accept a certain level of subjectivity, too. Not every aspect of the job of a grader can be transcribed into a point-by-point rubric, nor should professors be required to “not grade the argument, but how the argument is made.” 

Now, subjectivity does not mean obscurity. Grading should be transparent and logical, but it need not boil down to an algorithm the way the grading of a math problem set might. Consider a philosophy seminar: a philosophical paper can have perfect grammar and be the result of a formidable and honest effort and still, in the professor’s view, not quite provide a complete reconstruction of an argument, or argue a set of premises that are weaker than they should be or overstate a conclusion. 

And there are subjects where we already intuitively accept subjectivity; few people would argue that a creative writing seminar can be graded according to a solely objective rubric. However, the range of disciplines where we currently accept subjectivity is narrower than it should be considering how many more of the skills we learn here beyond creativity are qualitative.

None of this is to say that our expectations for final grades need to dramatically change. According to Yale’s own guidelines, an A in a class is “excellent,” a B “good” and a C “satisfactory.” So by the end of a semester, where an individual student can show the process of learning a class’ content and skills, it is reasonable to be working towards an A. 

But as the semester progresses, as we learn the necessary skills and content of a new discipline, we should learn to accept the markers of progress — upward trends and, occasionally, humble beginnings. 

We should recalibrate our knee-jerk reactions to grades in order to shift away from the shallow success-failure binary and toward grades as an educational tool and indicator of progress over time. We should trust our professors to leverage their experience and knowledge in grading our work, instead of adding to the pressure to dole out only the best grades for fear of poor evaluations or enrollment. 

And in the end, having set aside the 4.0 and our expectation of flawlessness, we will have learned a bit more, understood our progress in that much more detail and gone through four years of Yale with just a bit less stress. 

Unless you, the reader, happen to be my professor. In that case, I expect an A on my paper, because I wrote two entire drafts and only used Chat GPT for three paragraphs, thank you very much. Only joking, of course.

MANU BOSTEELS is a first year in Pauli Murray College. He can be reached at manu.boostels@yale.edu.