The GPA Battle

Growing up I always felt like a black sheep in my family; my sisters are both straight A students, my dad was a UCLA alum, and my mother was an educator. Education was always number one in my household, and the question about attending college was never a question. Just a period following the statement, “you will attend college.”

Looking at Laura McKenna’s piece “Will the Letter Grade Survive” made me feel like almost every young person, that “I was born in the wrong generation.” Only this time I felt that way for a future. If I was born 20 years after my birthday, maybe I would have been brought into a world without traditional A-F definitions. McKenna discusses the amount of institutions, primary and collegiate, that are doing away with letter grades for good. That rather than the traditional GPA’s we will be reviewed based on “portfolios” and such online for college admission and future endeavors. I can’t help but wonder how much less anxiety school would have brought into my life if that had been a focal point rather than GPA’s and exams.

I remember struggling from the time I was about 11 years old, the first time I was in a class that assigned actual grades. I was in sixth grade at a private catholic school revered even today for it’s high academic rigor. Most of my classmates went on to attend Mater Dei High School, and then to Villanova, Notre Dame, and even Ivy League universities. I attended Huntington Beach High School, as did both of my sisters. My middle sister is at Columbia University now. I can remember floundering in an environment geared towards pop quizzes and public ridicule from my nun of a teacher. Sister Winifred didn’t let it go unknown if someone got a poor grade on an assignment, no matter how hard I worked on it.

My mediocre performance was known to all my classmates. Combined with the way the classes were split up three times a week for the “high,” “medium,” and “low” math classes, school became something I would dread. I would take the trip next door for “medium” math class as my friends would tell me about the “high” class at recess. I was taunted for not achieving the same high grades as those around me, and I can remember when the elections for student counsel came around that May, the two people running for Vice President for 7th graders that year had both been cheating on exams. When Krystin Day got up to give her speech in the media center, I turned to my best friend and said “I saw the day she took our science test, she took out her notebook, flipped it to a page that had the answers and set it next to her desk. She got an A.” And my friend turned to me and told me about how Eric Hernandez had done the same. My heart sunk as I realized I wasn’t the only one struggling to keep up with the newly competitive environment. Krystin ended up at USC and is in a graduate program now, and Eric went on to art school. But somehow, even all those years ago, we were marked by our grades.

For years I’d have to admit to my mother what my grades were coming back as, and that I wasn’t doing as well as she would have liked. She would go to meetings with teachers and academic advisors when I was truly struggling, and usually came back filled with rage and pain. She’s a teacher and to have a kid struggle in school couldn’t have been easy. Joe Hirsch’s article on “Framing Difficult Feedback for Parents” would have been a far more suited response than my mother got when I struggled to keep my GPA up. Using the bundle method with how I was performing in primary and middle school would have offered something far more constructive for us to work with, and I wouldn’t have felt threatened by teachers or afraid of school.

The difficulties I faced in school followed me through high school, with the realization that in my honors English class freshman year I was the only one who took physical science rather than biology and the kid who sat in front of me turned around to see the standardized testing book for it. “What an idiot,” he murmured. I got a 3.5 GPA that year. I still wasn’t good enough. The years that followed were grades in the B/C range with the occasional A, as my sisters outshined me at the elementary school I left after 6th grade. My youngest sister became known as “Maddy’s little sister. How we love Maddy.” Rather than “Olivia’s little sister.” I tried to establish an identity but always felt the glances at my mediocre GPA next to those I took AP classes with.

I finally graduated and began college, I was far from home and from the pressure to stand beside my 4.5 GPA holding sister. But I was still battling, only this time it wasn’t my family. It was myself. I had fallen into a hole of mental illness, coming home only a year later with the diagnosis of clinical depression. My grades didn’t hold up when I wanted to die. Scraping C’s, I took the next semester off from school to recover. I still felt defined by a GPA I wanted to disappear, so I headed back into the belly of the beast. I enrolled at my community college and dragged my GPA up an entire grade point. I transferred schools and have been giving my all since last fall. This past semester I walked out with a 3.88 and all A’s. I still didn’t like the definition. I didn’t want to be known as a mediocre student or a straight A student. At the end of the day, I want to be known as Olivia. Someone who is a good person, someone who is giving and cares about others. Not a number scheme, and it seems as though the educational world is moving towards that and more open communication with parents about it.