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Don’t kill me, Dr. Jackson: I can’t remember the last time I checked my grades.
It’s not technological incompetence or fearful avoidance. Instead, it’s been my way of reaping the fruit of Hillsdale’s academic rigor and character-building. After four years, I’m happy to report that it’s worked.
The median college GPA has increased by more than 21% since 1990, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education. Though Hillsdale has experienced some of this “grade inflation,” as The Collegian reported in 2024, many professors are still averse to giving out an easy A. That means Hillsdale students still face the proper challenges of an academic environment.
Like many, I entered freshman year as an academic perfectionist. The high standards I set for myself paid off in some ways — I made it into Hillsdale, after all. But my high school friends knew me as a high-strung workaholic, and I was. Too much of my identity was wrapped up in quantifiable, exterior achievements. I would get emotional if I did poorly on a test, or ignore my family if a big project loomed.
In college, something needed to change.
Surrounded by bright peers and brilliant professors, I felt the temptation to turn these four years into a comparison game.
“Is my internship prestigious enough? Am I performing as well as my best friend in Great Books? Does my professor even like me?”
But it turns out, ignorance is bliss.
Sometime during freshman or sophomore year, I stopped checking my grades. Sure, I would see the individual scores of quizzes (bad) or essays (marginally better) when they were handed back. I had a vague sense of how I was faring in individual classes. But beyond that, I didn’t know. And gradually, I began not to care.
I felt free to take reputedly difficult professors without worrying about what it would do to my grades. I adopted extracurricular roles that increasingly took time away from academics. I spent evenings on the couch at home talking to friends instead of tackling my to-do list.
Learning grew richer and more fulfilling when it became less quantifiable. Classes offered life lessons, even when I struggled with papers. Essays were a chance to branch out. Stress dwindled when my self-worth didn’t hinge on the outcome of a test. My education, in short, became less about me.
Grades can be a helpful tool; it’s good they exist. For those planning on law school, medical school, or a master’s after Hillsdale, close attention to grades is warranted. But many of us could stand to step away from external quantifiers, be they grades, likes on social media, or confirmation that that scary professor did, in fact, like me.
In Alfred Tennyson’s imagination, the king Ulysses suffers from the vice of curiositas, or a disordered appetite for knowledge: “to follow knowledge like a sinking star/ Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
Don’t be Ulysses. This Lent, perhaps resolve to know less. It’s a great life.
Caroline Kurt is a senior studying English.
