The Over Rating of Marks in Education

In school, the things called marks (overrated little buggers meant to evaluate your progress in school. For most people, they are not a big deal, they come and go, and they don’t really think about them a lot. For others though, they can be a real problem (not in their eyes though). They can get obsessed with them and go insane! They lose sleep in some cases, think about their marks ALL the time, and sometimes to the extreme and commit suicide. It can also be a good thing sometimes, but I’ll talk about that later.

The first thing that persuades this obsession is pressure, from parents, teachers, peers, and other relations, especially parents. They force their kids to get good marks, and worry about them a lot. This worry eventually carries on to the kid. This pressure that always resides in the kids mind starts to take over and when a test or exam comes up, they start to cram this information in the fear of getting bad marks. This pressure environment that the kid experiences provides a conter-productive effect. Instead of digesting the information that they need to know, they stuff it down in haste and don’t learn anything for the long term.

This turns to obsession. This obsession and horrid pressure-environment consumes the child’s life and starts to annoy people around him or her. Personally, I don’t think that this is the point of public education. I think the point of our awesome (but over-conservative) education is to help us learn things for life. If you have a pressure-environment then you don’t really learn anything very well. The most dangerous part of marks is the personalization of them. When you get inflated with high marks, and depressed with low marks, then something needs to change. Living life and getting constant mood swings depending on the outside world can really screw you up. For the people that are obsessed with there marks, this is some good advice (also for the rest of the population as well.)

The other side of marks (opposite end of the extremity scale) is for people not doing to well. Then, its OK for the parents to point out that the kids are not doing well, and create a pressure-environment for them. For whatever reason, falling behind on your schoolwork and doing horrid is not a good thing. The people around the failing student should be pressured to strive for the better (unless that person has a valid reason for falling behind). Most of the time, marks are a good tool for evaluating your progress in education. All in all, paying attention to marks when you are doing bad (as long as you don’t let it affect you to much) can be a helpful thing.