The Credential Is Replacing The Reason for School

“What’re your stats?” It’s not a rare question asked only in scholarship interviews or college information sessions. I get asked it in the hallway, between classes, in the same tone you’d ask someone how they were doing. GPA. SAT. AP classes. Sometimes class rank, if the person is feeling bold.

At some point, “stats?” started showing up alongside “how are you?” as a way some of my classmates get to know each other and make conversation. Most of us probably don’t think much of it at the moment, as it is just a habit, but habits are worth looking at closely once in a while because they show what a culture has chosen to hold high importance.

This is part of what people mean by “toxic productivity,” the phenomenon where the obsession with being productive becomes harmful, a phrase that accurately describes the situations in high schools across the country. People often put too large of an emphasis on “the application” and forget what it means to be a student. There’s a version of school where you take AP chemistry because you’re curious what it’s like to understand chemistry, not because it needs to appear on an application. That version hasn’t disappeared, but it gets pushed away by a culture that encourages curiosity only once a quantifiable credential is attached.

For instance, a good friend of mine had to step back from taking theatre, a class she had loved throughout middle school, in pursuit of stacking just one more AP class on her schedule. I, myself, have fallen for this optimizing culture, as I quit tennis after 7 years to take AP biology my freshman year. I’ve heard people ask about a class or elective less in terms of “is this interesting?” and more “does this help my application?” or “how difficult is this class vs. how much multiplier do I get for this.” Part of what adolescence is supposed to allow for is trying things without knowing yet what you’re good at. 

National survey data suggests this trade-off is far from rare: in a large-scale survey of U.S. high schoolers, 90% of students said getting good grades was important, but fewer than 10% said school mattered to them because of the value of learning itself. The credential, in other words, has largely replaced the reason for the class. This credential-chasing impulse is not new. In 1846, Horace Mann warned that “if superior rank at recitation be the object, then, as soon as that superiority is obtained, the spring of desire and of effort for that occasion relaxes.” What has changed is that Mann saw this as a problem to be remedied in the schooling system. Now, our system is based around this impulse.

The view which measures the value of a person based on their “stats” is inherently flawed. Many socioeconomic factors can heavily influence how high those numbers climb before a student’s own efforts have an effect at all. A GPA depends on which classes a school offers, and not every school offers 25 APs. A test score depends on how many times a student can afford to sit for the exam. It also depends on if the family can afford extracurricular tutoring. The number presents itself as a measure of the student when, in reality, a good portion of it is a measure of the school and of households. Asking for someone’s stats treats the number as self-explanatory like it reports effort and nothing else. The practice also works as a small meritocracy, and just like any meritocracy, it makes an unequal starting position appear like a fair race. The students ahead believe they earned the points, and the students who do not are left with nobody to blame but themselves.

I do not believe that the student nor the institution is at fault, rather; the overall culture of over-optimizing for the future at the expense of the now naturally influences the culture within schools. This is detrimental for a number of reasons. For one, this encourages taking shortcuts that students believe are beneficial to their future-self, but actually positions them to fall; for example, students may cheat on a test. Additionally, this culture erodes students’ ability to choose what they are actually interested in. A student who chooses classes only based on multipliers has no way to answer what they would choose if numbers weren’t in the picture; when interest and numerical value are considered together for long enough, they stop becoming separate reasons.

Students should learn to identify the root cause as to why our current system requires these credentials for one to be deemed successful. For example, colleges may look favorably upon 5s on AP tests, but their goal in this is to encourage students to understand and apply materials from the course. Simply committing content to short-term memory for the sake of the exam completely misses the point. Students should learn to pursue their interests and curiosities so that understanding the material becomes the objective rather than the side effect of chasing the numbers. 

The irony is that this is also what the credential was designed to measure. A student who genuinely understands earns the 5 anyway. A student who memorized in April has forgotten by June. The work that students do now stops pointing at any meaningful goal. A grade was built to be a compressed signal for something too complicated to communicate directly; it was never meant to be the thing itself. Considering the environment we find ourselves in, colleges should put more effort into creating a culture where the curiosity and passions of students are held in the highest priority rather than numbers that incompletely describe a student’s quality.

Brian Han is an 11th-grade student in Texas.