Is Exeter Too Difficult?

In the past few months at Exeter, Exonians have dedicated a lot of talk to grades and the difficulty of Exeter. Through student-led assemblies, people have voiced opinions supporting a more relaxed and merciful Exeter grading system. Conversely, some claim that Exeter grades too lightly and should become a harder school. What’s more, others hold that grades shouldn’t matter at all, as they only put pressure on students. All of these opinions hold merit and center around two core struggles that Exeter’s grading system faces. While the grades we receive can certainly better distinguish us from one another and challenge us to stretch our limits, graders also have to ensure that students’ pursuit of a higher grade does not override the pursuit of knowledge that makes Exeter the school it is.

The purpose of grades should be to separate people who pass a course by their varying degrees of success. Grades separate the passers who barely passed from the passers who fully mastered all of the curriculum. With these distinguished layers of success, grades allow others to view students and honor those who pass higher than others.

In other words, grades should be relative to the performance of your peers. Those of us who are the best at math, writing or painting should receive marks denoting them as such. Institutions that grade on some predetermined standard only show that either a lot of students have acquired the skills to overcome the school’s standard or that their standard is too impractical. At Exeter, however, where our selectivity is known by many, relative grades efficiently display those who excel, contrasted by those who fail to do so.

Since grades should seek to distinguish students from one another, more can be done to distinguish average performers from another. While top performers obviously do and should receive highest grades, there are many middle-high performers who are unfairly grouped together with lower-middle performers. So, just as if high performers weren’t distinguished from the rest, many students in the middle do not get the proper honor they deserve. This issue isn’t present for most science, math and language courses that grade primarily on tests, but exists in humanities courses, where grades are more subjective. This issue arises not by surprise, though, given that humanities teachers face the difficult task of quantifying written work. While the math and science departments have the liberty of separating students based on skill, and then the simple task of averaging a list of test numbers, students are grouped by age for the humanities, and the teachers in those departments have to separate a much wider spectrum of kids.

With no lists of numbers to pull from, humanities teachers have to look at a student’s work as a whole to determine the grade. For math, no matter how hard a student tried, an 82 percent will always just be a B; for a humanities teacher, however, effort and the teacher’s mercy are now factored, so such an 82 student could easily receive a higher grade. For math, a 95, despite being on the cusp, is an A, and is therefore the student’s grade. In an English class, though, a teacher would already have a list of very skilled A students far above their grade level, and compared to them, the 95 student is much more of an A-. As a result, a bulk of students, all very different in skill, end up grouped compressed on the grade spectrum.

As a result of this issue, humanities grades fail to fulfill their purpose: separating students. To remedy this issue, it would be best if English teachers focused more on a student’s skill than their effort and spread the bulk of “average” students more throughout the grade spectrum. Effort should result in more comfort around the Harkness table and more skill with writing, but it should not be the cause for a higher grade. If this were done, students would gain a more precise measurement of where they are, and Exeter would become a ‘harder’ school without changing its overall rigor.

Now, while it is easy to dedicate a lot of time to thinking about grades, particularly our individual grades, it is important to note that they should be secondary to learning. At such a competitive place as Exeter, it is easy to get caught up on where you stand amongst your peers, which is essentially what grades attempt to show. However, grades do fail to capture our characters, our non sibi and our leadership. In fact, there are so many things that grades at Exeter fail to show, that as long as you try your hardest and try to learn the most from your classes, you should not place too much stress on yourself.