Many students receive bad grades in their classes but are actually smarter than what their grades show. Students often base their intelligence off their grades. A bad grade in a class could mean the student doesn’t do their homework or just doesn’t try, grades do not represent a student’s intelligence; they are just a letter.

In the Daily Campus it states, “Utilizing grades so heavily causes students to focus not on learning or honing their abilities but mastering testing and producing specific results. All too often, tests are based on regurgitation rather than actual learning.” Tests are major parts of our grades and doing poorly can take your grade down by a lot. The pressure and stress of grades and tests on students often form from students doing their work for the grade. They should be doing it for the sole purpose of education. Tests do not help this problem due to many of them not being based on how much the student knows about the topic. When students remember certain words and phrases in their head it does not show their true work or intelligence. For example, some students are very smart but get nervous and forget material on tests. This proves grades shouldn’t define students but their true knowledge should.

According to The Arizona State Press reads, “Take Bill Gates for example, a very wealthy and successful man who dropped out of Harvard University two years into his degree and later became the co-founder of Microsoft. He is intelligent, and yet he did not have a college degree when he started his company.” This establishes evidence that grades do not represent a student’s intelligence. Many stereotypes can also be associated with a student’s grades and how smart they are. Bill Gates is a leader who most people would consider a very smart man. Without a college degree, starting his company may have seemed doubtful and many people may not have believed in him. He didn’t value his grades as deeply because he knew they didn’t reflect his intelligence. Now showing where he is today, being one of the richest people in the world, shows that grades do not diminish someone’s value or intelligence and does not limit what someone can accomplish.

In conclusion, doing the work does not mean a student is intelligent but it may represent that they are hard working and reliable. This does not mean that grades aren’t helpful in gaining an understanding of a student’s personality or what kind of student they are. However, they shouldn’t be used to determine how intelligent a student is.

Resources:
https://www.statepress.com/article/2017/04/spopinion-grades-do-not-correlate-with-a-students-intelligence

‘My GPA Doesn’t Define Me’: Why grades are not an accurate measure of intelligence