Most teenagers and young adults already have a rocky relationship with self-image regardless of outside influence. It’s a stage of life when we’re building our identities and maturing as both a person and a personality, and with that period of growth also comes a period of fragility. This fragility presents itself as self-consciousness, social anxiety, and more, all of which culminate in a low self-esteem and poor self-worth. All these facets of (poor) self-esteem can be somewhat loosely related, outside their shared attack on mental health, but they all have something very strongly in common with one another; they all depend on an external stimuli in order to properly manifest, something to direct their negative effects towards and use against you. Today I’d like to bring to attention one of the most powerful influences we face, one which is both pervasive and universally widespread among students — grades.
Now, to elaborate on why grades are one of the most influential parts of our surroundings, we’ll first have to take a step back and explain why these influences have any power over us at all. Self-worth is built on perception, and as a result many of the problems with self-image students often face take root in things we perceive around us and take shape in what they mean. Take, for example, the way your hair looks in the mirror, or a glance a stranger gave you as you passed; on their own, they’re innocuous and mostly ignorable but once self-consciousness and social anxiety have latched onto them and reacted they suddenly become a haircut very visibly overdue and an annoyed glare. These mental struggles can affect the way we perceive what’s around us, but in order for that to happen there must be something to perceive. At the same time, similar emotions can occur due to a lack of stimulus as well, such as in silence or the dark, which can be (loosely) explained by that gap in stimulation being filled by a past reaction/perception from your memory, such as how you may sit there reliving a humiliating experience from four years ago as you lie in bed at night. This is of course a huge oversimplification of both, but for the purposes of this article (and for the sake of avoiding a full-blown psychology lecture) it is as deep of an understanding as we need.
Applying this to self-worth is slightly messier; self-worth is a result of one’s self-image, which is in turn a combination of our perceptions of ourselves and our surroundings, and what influences it is no different. The more overlap a stimulus has between the various thought processes that determine self-image, the greater an effect it will have. This can blur the lines somewhat as you try to account for all the wildly different stimuli that can affect your self-worth; however, it quickly becomes apparent the biggest influence for your self-worth is is by far most sources of validation and affirmation, which makes sense — something that tells you you’re good will make you see yourself as good, and something that tells you you’re bad will make you see yourself as bad. It’s a fairly obvious conclusion to come to, but an important one for the discussion to come.
External validation and affirmation can come in many different shapes and sizes, from a smile from a friend to winning an award — so much so that it’s almost a cop-out, considering it's such an umbrella term that pretty much anything you can encounter that would affect your self-esteem can be explained away by it. However, this just means it’s an effective definition, rather than a lazy one. Take the examples from earlier; the haircut (or lack thereof) is bad, which means you are bad. The look the stranger gave you was bad, which means you are bad. While this is kind of taking a 2+2 approach to something a bit closer to calculus, it’s a simple enough definition that it’s used extensively throughout the psychological field, and it’s the definition we’re going to continue on with.
Which brings us to the main topic of this article; grades. Grades inherently serve as a system of validation, created to tell students, teachers and parents whether or not someone is doing well or not. They exist to tell you whether your performance was good or bad. While they’re meant to be helpful as means of self-improvement, they more often than not actually have the opposite effect on students, often leading to inferiority complexes and being linked to anxiety disorders 1 , depression and suicide 2 3 in teens. However, that’s not necessarily their fault.
On their own, they’re not necessarily a problem; in fact they’re arguably beneficial to students. The real damage is a result not of the existence of grades, but of the weight schools and society have placed in them. Schools have begun to double down in preaching the importance of grades and how college has become a requirement for being successful; the workforce has set unrealistically high standards in qualifications for entry level jobs; and so forth. When students are constantly pelted with the idea that their entire future hinges on them getting straight A’s, it only makes sense that they would be blown out of proportion in those students’ minds. This exaggeration of their importance, paired with the inherently quantitative nature of grades, is what can be devastating for students. The grade itself is merely a vessel for the immense pressure that is being placed upon students and added to day by day. Good grades become good people, destined for success and happiness. Bad grades become bad people, sentenced to pain and misery. It’s this equating of grades and self-worth and success that leads to grade-linked mental illness. Every bad grade becomes a crushing, personal blow to your self-esteem, and good grades barely serve to keep you above water. School goes from finding greater knowledge and preparing for what’s to come to frantically scrambling for one A+ after the next for fear of the emotional consequences, focused less on actually learning and more on the letter-grade results.
The worst part of this combined effect isn’t even the mental impact it has — it’s the cycle it creates. The adverse mental effects from even one bad grade can severely a hinder student’s academic ability 4 , causing their grades to further suffer which in turn leads to more anguish, which can result in the student spiralling further and further, all the while likely being hounded by teachers or parents for their poor performance. Not only is this catastrophic for the student’s psyche and mental health, but it’s a cycle that’s incredibly difficult to get back out of.
I’m not preaching that grades be abolished; they’re an important tool towards readying ourselves for the future. Neither am I suggesting that you disregard grades altogether, since learning and education are crucial to becoming a functional, independent member of society. All I am asking is that the weight be taken off of those grades by the schools and society placing it, and that students reading this identify them as a potential cause for poor mental health and take a step back from the steady current that is the academic grind before it becomes a riptide. Grades are not, and will never, be a determination of intelligence. They report only performance, not ability; getting bad grades doesn’t make you dumb or stupid and more than getting good grades makes you smart or a prodigy. It’s impossible to quantify potential, and they shouldn’t be regarded as such. Your worth as a person is independent of academic performance, and always will be.
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