Pass or Fail

When you get your report card what do you look for? Most people have an average letter they are looking for; A, B, C, Ds and even Fs. If we were to take away our “letter grades” our society would falter: job offers would not include grades and not reflect intelligence: scholarships would only exist for athletes and musicians: and we would not have awards for hard work and perseverance. We need to keep our letter grades for our economy and to improve self esteem.

When you go into a job interview you will be questioned about your Cumulative GPA. If you didn’t have letter grades in your district or school there is no way to determine your GPA. Your employer could be looking for a smart person in one of their departments. How is he/she going to decide who is best for that job if two people both have all passing? If you went to Stanford or Harvard and worked extremely hard to receive the proper education for the job how is your employer going to decide if you really were a smart person by seeing the word passing? There would be no academic scholarships.

When you filled out an application for a scholarship you would not be considered unless you were an athlete or musician. Many reasons we have scholarships would change. You would not need to be a very smart person to play for the basketball team. You didn’t need a 3.5 Cumulative GPA to play in the university/college band. Our society would no longer have people setting goals for college that meet the regular standards. You wouldn’t need to study every night to qualify for a scholarship; your goal would be to play basketball every night. As a whole we would not have awards showing hard work.

My third reason we should have letter grades is that we can improve self esteem. If everyone in America could know exactly how their schooling improved them most people would be very happy. We would have less suicides and cases of medical depression. Instead we would have lots of people who were very happy with what happened. I know that some people would like to have a pass or fail grading system so that they wouldn’t have to work as hard, but then they wouldn’t be able to say that they really worked hard for what they earned.

In conclusion I want to emphasize how important I think letter grades are. We would have a better economy because we would know where you could and could not function properly. We would have a better education system because we would have people who still really tried hard to earn scholarships. Finally, we would have people who were happy with awards they received in high school and college for their dedication. I want you to help me fight for letter grades so that we can measure today and prepare for the future.