For students, grades are the backbones of our academic lives. They are the only real concerns in the educational process. They are the reward for time served. They are the incentive to learn something. We've gone to school for years with the thinking that grades are the necessary and absolute measure of intellectual competence.

I'm afraid that these assumptions are significantly weakening the learning process. This column is dedicated to exposing the fool's gold of our educational circuit — grades.

I'd like to describe the three most serious deformities of the educational grading system before I start hinting at solutions. Those three deformities include the transformation of the learning process into a tedious chore, the crippling effect on self-esteem and grades masquerading as a necessary measure of education and learning.

Grades are rewards. More specifically, grades are the extrinsic rewards of education and learning. They are prizes given out after a task has been accomplished. They share, essentially, no inherent connection to that task but are designed to make its undertaking more tolerable. This type of reward is dangerous because it undermines the task at hand, causing that task to appear undesirable. Because a prize has to be offered as an incentive to do it, the task is transformed into something that's seen as tedious and not worth doing for its own sake. When you imagine grading as a form of extrinsic reward, it becomes much simpler to identify its poisoning effect on education.

Grades have been teaching us that education and learning are the means to something else. The lesson is that education and learning are not valuable in themselves but can be useful in acquiring something better. We don't learn because learning is good in itself, we learn so that we can get the grades that will validate any effort put forth. A good grade is what invites praise, not the knowledge that you've acquired while earning that grade.

When everything in school is supposed to be a small-scale representation of the real world, it's easy to develop the attitude that nothing is worth doing unless you can be rewarded for it. It's very rare for someone in our society to consciously do anything without expecting adequate compensation.

Maybe the most disgusting impact that grading has had on education is its crippling effect on a student's ability to find value in himself. We take tests so that a teacher can appraise our intellectual worth. This tells us that intellectual self-esteem is contingent on a teacher's approval or disapproval of the work that we've done. We decide from an early school age that self-esteem is a commodity to be handed out. Everyone around us becomes our critic, a potential merchant to dispense that commodity. We're dependent on them to find value in us because we've never been taught that self-worth can be fashioned from the inside out. This would explain why peer pressure is so successful.

When others fail to value us or try to question our value through taunting and teasing, our link to self-satisfaction is severed. We can't feel good about ourselves when others don't think we're good. Could this be the reason that our children keep shooting each other? In recent cases of school shootings, it seems the kid (or kids) with the gun has had his self-respect ridiculed away. When antagonism is that corrosive on the human self-worth, who knows how far over the edge a child can be driven. I'm not justifying the act; I'm trying to uncover the causation for that act.

Perhaps one of the strangest misconceptions about grading is that it's assumed to always be a good measure of how much a student has learned. My Kinesiology 463 class (Motor Skill Learning) has taught me that learning is a construct. It can't be measured or observed directly. Learning, then, has to be inferred from performance outcome. However, the class constantly emphasizes that only looking at the outcome when checking for learning isn't always reliable because so many factors can confound the measurement. An example of one of these factors may be the frequent occurrence of a student memorizing facts and figures to ace a test. Sure, he could get an A on that test, but learning something implies that you can retain it and recall that information when it will be needed later on. We all know that memorized facts usually disappear a couple days after the test. Thus, no real learning has occurred while our grading system says otherwise. Interesting side note: The primary way that we're evaluated in this particular kinesiology class is still through performance outcome on traditional examinations. Go figure.

So why do we try and measure learning at all? Learning and intelligence are not things that can be accurately quantified, yet we attempt to do just that through our beloved grading system. The fact that we even try to measure learning supposes that we don't have any trust in each other to just have the desire to learn.

There is a widespread belief that people will get lazy if we don't keep them on their toes by administering a test or random quiz. This is so sad, considering it is the propensity of human nature to learn and satisfy one's own curiosity. Every day of our lives is spent learning. Whether through reading the newspaper or actively communicating with friends and family, humans certainly demonstrate a unique capacity to want knowledge for its own sake. It is this very stick-and-carrot grading system in our schools that dulls the desire to learn.

We have to stop thinking about our learning in terms of how it is connected to our grades. Over the past few semesters, I've given up on caring about my grades. I've also given up on taking notes. Sure I don't get every little irrelevant fact, but I have found that I do grasp the conceptual big picture with a much more acute proficiency. The only priority that I have as I sit through my classes is to learn something. Learning can actually be fun when you don't feel obligated to prove to someone that you're doing it.

I'm not so ambitiously goofy that I think we can just snap our fingers and make grades go away. Grade eradication is the ideal counterpunch, but it will have to be introduced gradually. To start, let's stop asking so many "only-one-right-answer" questions. This line of interrogation is the quintessential tool of the grading system. These questions are killing us. They limit our options and our freedom to choose. These questions force us to produce a conditioned response. Human nature makes us hate doing that. We hate taking tests with these questions. And, it follows that we hate learning because it culminates with this type of unfavorable evaluation.

I regret that I can't mention more solutions. As practical as many of them are, they're very complicated and can't be concisely explained in the space that I've been given. However, if this column has intrigued you and you'd like to learn more, just e-mail me. I love talking about this stuff . . . for its own sake.