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There’s your answer, AnimeGirl. High school students are immature. They work for grades. If a brilliant student who applies her talent gets the same high grade as a slacker who doesn’t have an eye for aesthetics, yes, the grading system is unrewarding. Immature high school students call the whole class a joke, rather than just the grading system, because they are too shortsighted to look beyond the most readily available and official-looking form of external “validation”. If differences in achievement within a class are not represented adequately by differences in grading, then it’s apparently impossible to know how well the student did and therefore the student is just taking getting through school the easy way.</p>
<p>That kind of thinking is what keeps so many young adults socially and emotionally stunted when they progress from an environment that shelters them from the need to do any high-level thinking, into a world where more mature people (i.e. almost everyone) recognize quality of work without a letter attached to it.</p>