Just to let you in on a little secret, here’s why I think grades are overrated in education…

Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution | Magazine: “Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in ‘if you do this, then you’ll get that’—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.”

I’d much rather have interested students than students I pound over the head for every grade percentage point.