Do you agree or disagree with this statement; Grades encourage students to learn. Give a particular reason to support.

Today, there are a lot of different education systems in the world to evaluate students. Although some may think grading is the best method of evaluation, others assert that competition makes learning process difficult. It is very stressful to motivate students judge their performance just according to score. As a matter of fact, we cannot measure students’ abilities based on final exams and we have to ask them do their best and surpass themselves.

First of all, we should not compare students based on grades because their abilities, attempts, intelligence and situation are different. For example, Finland education system evaluates students according their interests and attempts. Imagine two different students with different talents. One of them is very good at mathematics and the other on likes art and music. If we design mathematics question very hard, the first student will get good score while the second on will fail and get disappointed and this is not fair. After getting bad score, students would be upset and do not continue to try because they compare their grades with the best grade and feel despite their attempts, they are stupid.

Moreover, it is very stressful to think about the grade most of the time. Students should consider the learning process as an important issue. For example, I am not very good at learning a new language, so I cannot speak as fluent as my husband. This bothered me several time, especially when I could not get good scores at TOEFL exams and I felt ashamed. Every time I tried harder, but my scores did not change while my listening and speaking skills were improve. I found that the stress of getting excellent scores impede me to show the grader my best. Therefore, this experience taught me that grading system can prevent students to learn efficiently.

Furthermore, some teachers state that, without grade we cannot evaluate students and actually good scores are the best price for diligent students. I strongly reject this statements because after excellent score, a student does not want that his scores become lower, and then just will focus on grade and not on new information and knowledge. He desires to get the best score whatever happen for him, and this causes a lot of stressful situation without positive effects. Therefore I recommend to those teacher who thinks evaluation is hard without grading, to compare each student with himself and ask him to judge himself upon his attempts, obstacles and capabilities.

To wrap up, students cannot feel happy with grading system of education and their performance would decline dramatically. Even good scores cannot encourage them to study harder because after 100/100 there is nothing else to achieve to.