There is a cloud of stress looming over college students’ heads — a grade cloud — and it seems to be sucking the motivation to learn right out of the college experience.  

Do we attend class genuinely to learn? Or do we attend class in an effort to make as little effort as possible in pursuit of an ‘A’ grade? That is the question. The stress gets to be too much for some, thus affecting the capacity of knowledge we maintain after the completion of a course.

Stress is a real problem among college students. In fact, when I sat down to write this column, I started typing “Statistics on stress among” into Google and, before my fingers could finish typing my thoughts, “college students” completed the phrase in the drop bar. 

In 2005, The National College Health Assessment surveyed 17,000 college students and 25 percent reported they had “felt so depressed it was difficult to function” three to eight times in the past 12 months. That is a substantial amount of students who are being limited by an overbearing amount of stress. But stress does not just fall out of the sky and inflict its wrath on Bobby or Sally because it feels like it. This kind of stress and depression is caused by something specific. It seems to be caused by the first six letters of the alphabet — the longing for the first letter, and the fear of the sixth. 

Grades at universities act as emperors, the students bowing before them to earn their rightful prize of self-esteem. A professor at Harvard University interviewed 40 students who did not thrive academically their first year.  He found that the 20 who asked for help improved their grades and felt happy. As for the 20 who did not, they took a turn for the worst and ended up failing, feeling isolated and unhappy. The sight of forsaken failing grades caused the students unhappiness and stress.

It is as if we are trapped in an old comedy show, where the two jokesters can never find each other because they keep going into different doors that lead to different places at the same time. One would leave the room and the other would appear, but they would never meet. We will never meet the point of maximum retention if we keep venturing into a revolving door of problems.

To break the curse, we, as a scholarly community, need to alter the way we assess a given student’s success so that we can combat the level of stress that is strewn upon them. 

Yale, Stanford and Berkley are among law schools that use alternate grading scales. Instead of letters, the students receive grades such as honors, pass, low pass or fail. For Stanford, the grading scales switched over after weighing the issues of anxiety and their effect on students. 

The results of the switchover seemed to constitute happier, less stressed students.

The combination of stress and grades is spinning the collegiate world quickly to knowledge-retention oblivion. It seems as though an alternative grading system is the only thing left to stop the revolving door, aiding us to step out and realize our true potential.