In the cheerful days after the dust had settled on my first semester at Brandeis, I found myself quite obsessed with the sage Web site. You see, for the first time, I could check my grades. In high school, I was at the mercy of a mailman delivering an envelope. I never knew when he might arrive at my door; it was a waiting game that sometimes lasted weeks. But now-at seemingly any moment of the day-I was free to just log on to a Web site. And, in a matter of seconds, I could see if my GPA had been updated. So I checked, on average, about 50 times a day. Let's put aside for a second how neurotic I may be about grades. True, some people are more skilled than I am at putting their academic worries aside and enjoying their vacation. I have some friends who barely remembered to check their grades after they finished finals. Regardless, I think we can all agree that students have a common desire to receive high marks on their transcripts. We all have plans for after college (whether or not we are aware of what they might be). Most of them require some evidence that we succeeded in our studies.

But are grades really evidence of success? It may depend on how we define "success." For some students, a higher GPA means a successful semester. But for others, success can be measured by how much we have actually learned. An enriching semester of straight Bs may, for some people, actually be better than a dull semester with straight As. All too often, students fall into the former group, and focus too much on their GPA and how classes will affect them. For example, during preregistration last semester, I overheard numerous students asking upperclassmen in which classes it is easiest to get an A. But for roughly $5,000 a class, shouldn't the goal be the value of intellectual pursuit and not the grade we receive? There are two main problems with the grading system as it stands now. One, it inevitably forces many (but not all) students to overlook the inherent value of learning and focus too much on their GPA. Second, it forces students into cutthroat competition (just ask any premed student), which often produces unnecessary stress.

Call me idealistic, but I think that we need more than a love/hate relationship with our academics. So, if you ask me, the whole system is in need of a shakeup in order to solve the two problems mentioned above. Instead of meting out the traditional A through F grades, professors should have the ability to give three marks: pass with distinction, pass and fail. This system is very similar to some graduate school programs (especially medical schools, such as the Albert Einstein School of Medicine) that refrain from handing out letter grades. "Passes with distinction" would only be handed out to the best of the best in every class (perhaps 5 percent of the students). Every professor would have a quota for the amount of these grades he/she can hand out. There would still be incentive to study and work hard-because everyone would want to be in that top 5 percent. And the "passing" grade would be raised to a higher standard than we know it now. This way, students who had no chance of passing with distinction would not be able to just sit back and vacation for a semester.

In order to give graduate schools a means of evaluating students, Brandeis should still hold final exams at the end of every semester (this is loosely modeled after the University of Oxford). This way, students still receive grades, but they know that their performance in the class will not be affected by their score on the final. While this system may still produce stress, it would reduce cutthroat competition because there would be just one period of examination at the end of the semester instead of numerous exams throughout a term. And students may be more encouraged to learn for the sake of learning.

Ultimately, we all use college to lead us to something even greater. Our classes are meant to be a means to achieving something important and not ends unto themselves. And when grades get in the way of real learning, and prove to be an obstacle, it makes most sense to eliminate them in favor of a more appealing system.