Today is report card day. I’ve looked them all over and I don’t think there are going to be any surprises for parents. A few positive bumps, a few dips, but overall pretty good results for students at our school. Further to this, I’ve only heard positive news from our grads about getting into the programs they want to get into. This last point, post high school admissions, is the only reason grades are really important… but I can spend hours telling you why marks shouldn’t be the only thing that matter.

I haven’t looked at the stats recently, but pre-covid stats about drop out rates during or after the 1st year at the top two universities in our province were 14% and 12%. I know some of these are students changing their minds, or other legitimate reasons, but I also know a large percentage of those dropouts are students who just couldn’t handle the change from high school. Most were probably straight ‘A’ students. They did well on all of their report cards. They were good at high school. They were good at giving the teacher what they wanted. They were good at test taking.

Then they head off to university. With no parents or teachers policing them, and no regular routines to follow, without after school activities that they used to fill their high school evenings with, there is suddenly a lot more responsibility to manage time. With professors not outlining assignments as clearly, or not providing samples of expectations, the work seems harder to manage and still get top grades. And for some, the freedom away from strict schedules is a chance to rebel a bit, and late nights don’t go very well with school work production and studying. There are as many variances to the reasons as there are students, but 12 and 14 percent drop out rates are a significant number when you consider the thousands of students who apply and don’t get into these top universities. Those are high percentages of top students not handling the transition.

Grades don’t tell the whole story.

What did students create? How did they build community? How did they manage their time? What does their portfolio look like? Portfolios aren’t just about art, they can be projects. It’s not surprising that a kid like this gets into a top music program in the country and wins awards, or when this kid gets into art school, or one of these kids gets into a small 40-student two year business program, and the other one gets into Mechatronics. It’s disappointing when a kid like this doesn’t get into the Ivy League school school he wanted to, but he still got into Computer Science at UBC, and  he didn’t drop out after his first year. None of these kids have or will drop out after a year, unless they decide they want to do something different.

All of these kids were ‘good at school’, but that wasn’t all that they were. They were students who had opportunities to work on their passions while in high school. They were students who had time in their schedule to decide what they were going to do, and they learned to manage that time… like they would have to at university. Not all of them were straight ‘A’ students, but all of them were successful students that got to demonstrate more than just good marks on tests.

To get into university my average was 73%. By the 4th year at my university, back in 1990, the average to get into the same general arts program was 81%. Had I been born just 4 years later my meager average would not have gotten me into my university of choice. Today, most popular programs at top universities demand an average well above 90%. But I have to wonder, how many of these high achieving students are going to drop out after a year? How many of them will have high school experiences that truly prepare them for the transition into these high stakes programs?

What other evidence should universities put weight on besides marks? I’d take a ‘B’ student with curiosity, drive, and a wide variety of interests over a straight ‘A’ student who fights for every 1/2 percent they can on a test. I’d take them in my university. I’d hire them at my company. I’d even be more likely to want them as a colleague or a friend. Grades should matter, they just shouldn’t be the only thing that matters, and the stakes on them shouldn’t be so high. Being a good student should also mean being a well rounded students, and that would improve the success rate of students finishing more than just one year at a university. When grades are used as the only measure to weed out students, many of the students being weeded out are exactly the students universities are wanting.