Cutthroat Competition Harms Students

Near the end of my senior year of high school, one of my closest friends was charged with being part of one of the biggest cheating scandals the county had ever seen.

Although I had no idea it was happening, he and a few friends managed to sneak into teachers’ rooms and steal answer keys prior to dozens of exams.

He was the president of his school’s National Honor Society and was to be awarded the title of “salutatorian” at graduation a few weeks later. When he was caught, he lost both his titles as well as his acceptance letters to several top-tier schools.

I was devastated when I learned of his dishonesty. Before I cut ties with him, I asked him for a full explanation behind why he did what he did.

To this day, his answer strikes me as an embodiment of what competition and grade inflation have done to our generation’s scholars.

“I did it because everyone else was doing it,” he told me, practically crying on the phone when I told him I could not be friends with someone who had been lying to me for so long. “I did it because, by not doing it, I was cheating myself. And I know it was wrong. I knew it, but I wanted to do well in school and the only way to do as well as I wanted to when everyone else was cheating was to cheat.”

The fact that a student felt the need to shortchange his morality to keep up amongst and ahead of his peers is indicative of just how serious this problem has become.

Somewhere over the past few decades, the education system has set students in an arms race against one another as well as themselves.

But perhaps the most worrisome byproduct of what has become of schooling is what it is doing to the quality of learning.

So what is it about the education system that makes learning so scary? Why has it gotten to a point where last minute cramming and memorizing facts that disappear the next day are normal methods for attempting to master? Why do the vast majority of college students admit to cheating throughout college? Why is it that those who haven’t cheated have felt the pressure to do it?

I realized the real source of learning’s degradation after my junior year of high school, when I attended the Governor’s Honors Program (GHP), a summer camp run by Georgia’s Education Department. GHP worked exactly like school did — each day consisted of classes, homework and discussions. The striking difference between the program and the nine-month school system laid in a single factor: GHP didn’t involve grades.

Within hours of my first day of classes, I began seeing a difference between how people interacted in the classroom. Students were less afraid to speak out and more willing to participate in class, simply because they were no longer worried about how their behaviors would be reflected on their transcripts. In school, we were not learning solely to learn. We were learning because it had become another part of the daily agenda, a requirement that would later be stamped with a bright red letter grade.

At GHP, I started finding assigned reading pleasurable, noticing the intricacies in the texts rather than trying to memorize facts and quotes for my next quiz.

Meanwhile, in high school, things were different.

The top five percent of my graduating class (a group that I was personally part of) were all relatively close friends, bound together by their Advanced Placement course-filled schedules. Still, there was tension. There was a general awareness among the five percent that each had the ability to threaten another’s chances of getting into their ideal dream schools.

We shared our answers, but rarely. We were cautious about who we helped and what we said. Our GPAs were only hundredths of a decimal point apart, and one ruined test grade could mean a shift in class rank for all of us. Sabotage was rampant but subtle. Backstabbing was even more common. Competition and the grading system threw into a dangerous arena a group of students who called each other “friends.”

And thus lies the call for change. I am not asking for the complete removal of grades or for honor code standards to be stricter.

I am envisioning a world in which grades and GPAs are only an afterthought, a world where a series of numbers aren’t the only factors that define an individual or measure success.

What could be done to make this happen? School administrator Alfie Kohn presents a solution in chapter of a radical article titled “The Schools Our Children Deserve” and “The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement.” The article also addresses the various byproducts of the problem of achieving over learning.

“The real problem isn’t grade inflation,” Kohn writes. “It’s grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.”

He continues his argument with a list of five unsettling consequences of obsessing over standards and achievement:​

1. Students come to see learning as a chore. Students who are primarily concerned with being successful grade-wise or performance-wise may do well at a task, but genuine or natural interest regarding the subject matter decreases immediately when achievement is outlined as the single greatest goal.

2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks. If the purpose of learning is to succeed rather than expand boundaries or ascertain new limits, then many students prefer to do whatever is easiest to reach a higher level of “achievement” (or a higher grade). If less effort or the “easier way out” allows of a minimal chance for failure, this route will be the route that students will choose to take.

3. Students tend to think less deeply. When the purpose of learning focuses on producing or recalling the correct answer in order to score well on an exam or test, students end up thinking more superficially. They ultimately memorize facts, theories or concepts without trying to understand how or why they were formed.

4. Students may fall apart when they fail. Students are generally fine as long as they are doing well, but as soon as something changes they begin to see themselves as failures and attribute their achievement (or lack thereof) to personal characteristics and flaws. Even momentary stumbles (one “low” test grade) can cancel out any past successes. For many students, when the purpose of learning is not to learn but to prove how “good” they are, it is often difficult to come to terms with being “less than good.”

5. Students value ability more than effort. When achievement is made out to be the primary goal of learning, students begin to attribute their successes to their abilities rather than to their work ethics or effort-levels. The “I do well because I am smart” or “I do not do well because I am not smart” mindsets take precedence and create destructive mentalities that may carry on into future endeavors. Students may simply give up on future tasks in the workplace because they believe that “ability” is necessary and “effort” does not play a role in success.​​

The only real, probable solution is to make a solid effort to decrease the importance of traditional grades and standardized tests (which have their own disadvantages of being “(a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.”

Whatever the case, a movement towards change is necessary to preserve the value and meaning of learning and to remove students from the almost-toxic setting that pressures them into finding shortcuts such as cheating.

Unfortunately, as I watch the interactions between my brother (a freshman in high school) and his teenage friends during the weekends at home, I realize that the situation is exacerbating.

My brother is taking two more AP classes than I did my freshman year and is already worrying about what his grades will do to his class rank and what this will mean for his college applications. He wants to quit his orchestra class because he worries that it will bring his numeric average down. After getting a low “A” in a double-accelerated math class, he submitted a form to take the grade off his transcript so he could re-take it for a better grade in the summer.

The pressure is ridiculous. And it is increasing.

Change is not an option. Change needs to happen. And it needs to happen fast.

In the words of Marilyn French, “Only extraordinary education is concerned with learning; most is concerned with achieving: and for young minds, these two are very nearly opposite.”

Sunidhi Ramesh is a College freshman from Johns Creek, Georgia.

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