The IGSS teachers have over a decade of experience working in an environment where some of our students take grades and some do not. Our experience has taught us that students who decide not to take grades, and instead use only our narrative feedback to describe their coursework, are more motivated, more resilient, more creative, and more self-directed. 

Below is a list of reasons why we think students would be better off choosing not to have their coursework translated into conventional letter grades. Some of these reasons are supported by research and are direct quotations from this research, and some of it is supported by our experience working with IGSS students. 

• Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.  A “grading orientation” and a “learning orientation” have been shown to be inversely related.

• Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task. For example students may choose a shorter book, or a project on a familiar topic, in order to minimize the chance of doing poorly — not because they’re “unmotivated” but because they’re rational.  

• Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.  They may skim books for what they’ll “need to know.” 

• Grades tend to reduce student risk taking in projects, essays, and artwork. 

• Grades become the goal making students extrinsically motivated. Research has shown time and again that intrinsic motivation leads to more profound learning. 

• Grades put an emphasis on product, while we would like to emphasize process and progress as more important than product. 

• Grades support a fixed mindset; whereas, classwork without grades supports a growth mindset. With a growth mindset, students are more likely to deal positively with mistakes and missteps. 

• Grades tend to create adversarial relationships with teachers who need to put more focus on critical comments in order to justify why an assignment didn’t get an A. 

• Grades don’t prepare children for the “real world” — unless one has in mind a world where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant.

• Grades tend to have a negative impact on our students’ mental and emotional health. 

• Grading does not appear to provide effective feedback that constructively informs students’ future efforts. This is particularly true for tasks involving problem solving or creativity.

• Passing or failing grades can depend on the grading policies of the teacher; not necessarily about actual learning.

• Grades provide an impetus for students to over-enroll in classes beyond an appropriate level of challenge for potential GPA boost 

• Grades tend to create negative dynamics in a classroom, setting up an “us vs. them” mentality rather than a partnership.

• Grades appear to play on students’ fears of punishment or shame, or their desires to outcompete peers, as opposed to stimulating interest and enjoyment in learning tasks

• Grades are superficial measures, which aren’t designed to capture nuance or sophistication.

• Grades (especially based on homework) benefit and reaffirm students with strong social capital like stable home environments, access to technology, freedom from having a job, etc.

While the IGSS teachers feel strongly about the negative impact grades have on our ability to teach high school students, we are also very familiar with the pressure and anxiety parents feel in terms of GPA and college admissions. We’ve sent eleven classes of seniors off to college and statistics determined by the Post High School Counseling Office confirm no difference in acceptance rates between IGSS students and the rest of the New Trier student body. This is especially significant because significantly more than half of our students chose not to take grades in IGSS! We are not here to force anyone to take IGSS without using grades. We support all of our students equally.