I was five when I decided to be a writer, but when you come from a first-generation Korean-American family, even at five, you learn to hold your tongue about your ambitions. The only person I told was my grandfather—curled around him in his library, I told him what I was afraid to tell my own parents. He looked at me with sympathetic eyes, as if he knew everything I’d have to endure, and whispered, “There needs to be one person in this family who is in love with what they do.” I wrapped my arms around him and cried.

When I entered my freshman year of high school, the ambition was still there, the dream still the same, so age didn’t distort the vision I had for myself. I’m certain I began to lose faith in that dream when I began to see myself as a product of my grades rather than my passion: a number, a letter, a transcript. In retrospect, it's no wonder I began to hate what I saw in the mirror.  

School administrators nationwide tell students they're not defined by test scores and they encompass more than what’s on their transcripts, yet they recognize students as seven-digit student IDs and judge them by what can be valued on paper. As much as we’d like to believe that our children aren’t defined by a set of numbers, so much is untrue. What’s worse though, is that when schools reinforce this mentality of looking at students as a product of their letter and number grades, students begin to look at themselves and their peers in this light too.

According to Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and author of What Straight-A Students Get Wrong, grades have little correlation with “creativity, leadership and teamwork skills.” Though it is even proven that students with lower GPAs have higher success rates than their counterparts, they still equate their worth to marks on scantrons. Grant indicates that this obsessive nature “creates an academic arms race that encourages... students to strive for meaningless perfection,” strengthening the argument that despite students knowing it won’t matter what they get on their AP exams or SAT in the long run, they’re still driven by the compulsory notion to aim for the unobtainable.

In a perfect world, students would earn grades and awards that reflect their work and effort. But in the world of high-school education, someone who gets a question correct because of their 25% chance of being right is viewed on the same standard as a person who got the answer because they knew how to do the work. There’s no difference between these answers or students on paper, and schools sustain this mentality—the grade you earn in the end is more important than what went into getting that grade. When students apply to college, they’re not asked for how much time they’ve spent studying, or how much they love and care for what they study; they’re asked for numbers, and in the end, maybe that’s all that really matters.

Annie Jia, a Stanford columnist reporting on teenage grade obsession, quotes psychologist Madeline Levine when discussing student stress. Jia couples the rise in stress with weak development of character, referencing Levine’s quote that when students “feel that they’re only as good as their last performance, [the stage is set] for the inability to construct an internal sense of self.”

This art of perfectionism is encouraged by mindsets of students all across the board. When students begin to see their efforts as meaningless, or worse, fruitless, they subconsciously reinforce the reciprocal process of putting more pressure on themselves, convinced they aren’t doing enough work if they don’t have the grades or merit to show for it.

The problem of grades defining students, reinforcing an unhealthy cycle of perfectionism doesn’t even have a name. How can you give it a name when so few people recognize it as a root problem of society’s schooling? Solving the problem doesn’t require changing the world, it requires changing yours. Though schools look at students as a reflection of merits on paper—grades earned, test scores received, and classes taken—I remind myself constantly that students are more than that, that students must be more than that. Because in the end, students are not two-dimensional reflections of a number, a letter or a transcript, but products of passion and ambition and heart: things that cannot be measured on paper.