In a world where creativity has been supplanted by credentialing, it's no wonder that we focus quite a bit on arbitrary markers of success. Stop and think about your biggest successes in life and odds are your mind will go towards "graded" accomplishments far quicker than meaningful relationships. We see the call for it all around us, and we learn to base our sense of self on those grades, both literal and metaphorical, from the time we are young. This emphasis on quantifiable success often hides the reality that statistically speaking, half of our work will always be below average. That's simply the way the math works.
Throughout my K-12 experience, grades certainly became a focus for me. I still remember getting a spelling test word wrong for the first time, crying, and needing to be consoled by the teacher. I'm not sure whether my focus on grades came from, as my parents didn't provide any pressure to succeed but always supported my endeavors. Nonetheless, those grades very quickly became a part of my identity. Once that identity had been firmly implanted in the minds of my peers, I seemingly had no choice but to continue to live up to those expectations. Who would I be otherwise? I slowly began to take for granted that anything less than an "A" was possible, and certainly didn't think of anything I did as "below average". However, by whatever standards I had set, it of course had to be in some instances.
These expectations, coupled with the human capacity for conscious and unconscious bias, makes it almost a foregone conclusion that grade inflation would take hold at all levels of education. In recent decades, the pressure to perform, get into a "good school", and find a "good job" has only exacerbated the expectations for success. Every year, new studies emerge that provide more evidence of grade inflation at the K-12 and higher education levels. Scholars pen op-eds about the decline of academic rigor and the pressures to give out higher and higher grades in order to ensure the positive course evaluations necessary to keep their jobs. Research has even linked grade inflation to gentrification and increases in real estate prices near schools with "higher" overall grade averages. It's become so widely understood that it has garnered the attention of legislators eager to ensure it doesn't continue. Good luck trying to legislate fair grading practices.
All of this, of course, happens outside of conversations about actual learning. Grades have become less about demonstrating comprehension and/or mastery of a subject or idea, and more about a demonstrated ability to follow a set of predetermined rules. As I've said before, we've replaced creativity with compliance. It makes sense, then, as creativity is stripped from the academic enterprise, that seeing oneself as below average at any given point would be more and more difficult. If I am asked to do the same thing over and over again, it will eventually become rote and I can almost universally expect success each time I complete it.
Perhaps, then, what we are really discussing here is how we are trained to possess and rewarded for possessing a particular mindset. Carol Dweck famously introduces us to the growth mindset in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. As opposed to a fixed mindset, a growth mindset allows us to believe that effort can make us stronger and smarter, and thus encourages us to put in the extra work necessary for that to become a reality. I would also posit that a growth mindset allows us to recognize that our work will not always be above average, but it all presents a learning opportunity for us. It all presents an opportunity for us to flex our creative muscles, to ask better questions, and explore new ideas. Furthermore, in a growth mindset, this desire is not driven by the external and arbitrary validation of grades, but rather an internal drive to succeed.
Our work may be below average half of the time, and grades may betray our actual learning, but a growth mindset can power our efforts and desire to explore our ideas and creative endeavors. We would do well to remember this, and look past the "grade" to the work itself and what there is to be learned from it.