Last week, while waiting for office hours with Associate Professor of History Matthew Gaetano, a freshman student introduced himself to me. The moment I shook his hand with a “Hi, I’m Sarah,” he immediately asked me if I was “the one with the 4.0.”
After affirming that he had accurately remembered what was published by both The Collegian and the Student Activities Board about this year’s President’s Ball court nominees, I spent the next five minutes telling him why graduating with a 4.0 is not necessarily a mark of success.
In my own academic career, it certainly reflects dedication and hard work, but also moments of inappropriately prioritizing my studies over social activities, prayer, and rest. A’s are goods when they reflect academic excellence, but they are never ultimate goods.
In last week’s Letter to the Editor, Professor of History Tom Conner proposed an interesting argument for why student GPAs should be kept private rather than announced at public events, in our campus newspaper, and elsewhere. But I believe that the most important reason why the college should be more thoughtful before revealing GPA information is not as much an argument about privacy as it is an argument about integrity.
Like any academic metric, a student’s individual GPA is influenced by many factors: the courses they have taken, the professors teaching those courses and their respective grading standards, natural intelligence, and willful perseverance. Each person’s GPA is also shaped by their extracurricular commitments, individual obligations, and the varied circumstances of their personal life. No GPA exists in isolation, and thus a GPA is only intelligible when framed within the entirety of a student’s life.
One of the key purposes of the college is to teach students to live with integrity — integrity meaning the quality of being whole and undivided. To live a life of integrity is to live a life that is coherent rather than fragmented, driven by a consistent purpose rather than motivated by aimless passions. To live with integrity means learning how to see one’s life as something unified, and then to incorporate everything one does into that unity.
If we are serious about this vision of integrity, then we should encourage students to think about their GPAs as they fit into the whole of their lives, remembering that each of those lives are meant to find fulfillment in unique, distinct vocations.
In my own life, because I discerned that I was called to the medical profession, I knew my GPA was important — not inherently, but instead as a means by which I would be capable of pursuing what God wanted for my life. For another student who has discerned a number of other equally worthwhile pursuits, their GPA may be less important, or maybe just as important, or more important. For all of us — myself included — earning a 4.0 is almost always excessive and unnecessary, but even a 3.7 or 3.8 is only honorable insofar as it fits within the context of a student’s broader life.
I, too, remember arriving at Hillsdale College as a freshman, frightened by the constant chorus of “Hillsdale is hard, adjust your standards, be ready to earn C’s.” Four years later, I do not regret most of the time I spent reading, writing papers, studying for exams, and performing laboratory experiments. The GPA I earned as a result has enabled me to pursue my vocation as a physician, and I am profoundly humbled by the opportunity to begin medical school next year.
To be entirely honest, I am not sure whether we should publicize student GPAs, and what context would be best to do so. What I do know, however, is that certain presentations of GPAs run the risk not of exposing too much, but instead too little, about a student’s life. GPAs that fail to place grades within the context of our dynamic, multi-faceted, and hopefully integrated and vocation-driven lives paint only impoverished visions of the students to whom they belong.
Our GPAs are important, and we should remember that our GPAs matter. A student’s GPA is one of the things that might allow him to continue his education or pursue a professional career. These, in turn, will allow a student to love others and transform the world in the way in which God desires. So pursue understanding and study hard.
College is a rare and privileged time for learning, and one we will not be able to repeat at any other moment in our lives. Take time to visit with professors. Make writing center appointments. Re-read the paragraph you don’t understand. Identify what distracts you from genuine contemplation. Take time to ponder deeply the ideas you are encountering in the classroom. If you do these things honestly and with diligence, I hope that you will succeed academically.
Learning at Hillsdale has fundamentally altered my entire way of looking at the world. More than anything, however, I am grateful for the way in which my studies — and everything that has been part of my life at Hillsdale over the past four years — have radically transformed me as a human being.
And so, to every person on this campus whom I have been blessed to learn with and from, especially the student I met in Delp last week, what I would say is this:
Never forget that before you are a student, you are first and foremost a person called to live a life of integrity. Integrity is difficult. It will demand that you wrestle with who you are, what your purpose is, what forms the basis of your life, and where you are going. Lots of people can tell you to get good grades, but fewer can tell you how to live in a meaningful way. Understanding what sort of person you are meant to become does not free you from your responsibilities as a student. Your academic obligations will not be dissolved, but instead intensified, for now they will be endowed with a deep purpose.
As a campus community, may this be what we strive to honor and promote more than anything — not just the 4.0, which is held up as an isolated or ultimate standard. But, instead, the life of integrity which respects study as an essential, though never all-encompassing, aspect of our life here at Hillsdale College.
Sarah Becker is a senior studying biochemistry and philosophy.