Good Grades Essay

Intelligence has been used over the years to describe a person. It has formed into a word which means a student is remarkably smart. A person’s intelligence level is always backed up by their grades and how they did in school. People have come to believe that an “A” is smart and “F” is dumb. Good grades do not meet the definition of intelligence. There have been various definitions used to define intelligence. The legal definition of intelligence is a person 's unique and individual information about a category and a category as a set of things in the world (Howard). The common definition used is “the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations” and “the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one 's

Imposing the need to have good grades on children may also be problematic. First they remove the motivation to learn from a child (Crouch). The pressure of needing good grades tend to make a student only see the goal of completing an assignment by the due date and bring back a good grade. It impacts a student’s “desire to learn for learning’s sake” (Crouch). It also adds to pressure to students to cut corners, take easier courses, and sacrifice ethics, in an effort to achieve better grades instead of better learning (Crouch). Grades can also lead to stress and cheating. Pressure from parents and schools to achieve top scores has created high stress levels began as early as elementary school (Palmer). When Denise Clark Pope, a lecturer in the School of Education, shadowed five high school students for a year she found out the students spent most of their time “finagling the system” in order to get good grades (Palmer). According to Pope every class where a test was given, cheating occurred (Palmer). She also added, “Students feel as if their life success depends on getting the top SAT scores and the highest grades” (Palmer). After Palmer talked to the children she found out that the students know that cheating is wrong and they wish they didn’t do it. The students feel that the most important act is getting good grades, “by hook or by crook”