Before you read this, a simple disclaimer that marks are not completely useless, students just shouldn’t give too much importance to test and exam marks. Students need to pay attention to their studies because in this world, education will get you to the top. But in this argument, marks don’t show the education of a student. Education isn’t determined by how much the student scored in his exams, education is how the student behaves and how civilised the student is in the modern-day society. Marks also don’t prove the intelligence of the student. All students are smart, and exam marks shouldn’t show their IQ. Intelligence is the creative ideas and analysis of those ideas that the student can put forth. An exam is just a paper seeing how well you have studied. The marks you receive are nothing but numbers that your parents and relatives see to determine your mental intelligence.
Marks are also responsible for high student suicide cases. These cases are growing day by day with one student estimated to take their own life every hour. Statistics show that in 2016 there were 9,478 student suicide cases and in 2018 cases rose to 10,159. Another study showed that 82% of adolescent students suffer from stress due to exams. One reason why students get stressed during exam season is because of the low motivation levels or demotivation that students receive when preparing for exams. Parents push the child to get 90% or higher in exams and when they don’t receive that grade they are punished by their parents. School highly demotivate students during exam season by scaring the students. Schools say that if a student doesn’t get the needed grade then they won’t pass out of this grade. This doesn’t give the student motivation to work hard, but the thought of not being able to get to a higher standard gets stuck in their mind and haunts them. This will not only raise stress levels but also cause sleep deprivation, not eating, not talking to anyone, being tired all the time and as a result depression.
The real reason marks don’t matter is because they oppose what a student wants to do in the future. Bill Gates failed in all his exams, while his friend got high marks in them; now Bill Gates owns Microsoft and has $113 billion in his name, and his friend is working as an engineer under him. Gates teaches us that getting marks doesn’t help you any bit, it’s your creativity and strong ideas. Gates sold his computer program to a private school and started working on Microsoft in his garage and it built into a billion dollar company fast. Another example is Mark Zuckerberg. Even though Zuckerberg scored high grades and went to Harvard, he didn’t need a degree or diploma to begin Facebook; he knew more about coding than all of his professors. Facebook was made for fun for the Harvard students, then later spread around the world faster than Covid-19. He didn’t need a high grades to start The Facebook Project, all he needed was an idea: one that was creative, qualitative and new.
So to conclude, the exam marks that you are getting proves nothing. If a topper gets 100% in exams and you get 50%, that doesn’t mean you are dumb, it means you worked hard and that is more important than scoring high. Getting high marks isn’t an achievement, it’s just a gold coin you are showing off with to the ones who have silver and bronze coins, yet those people will work hard to turn the silver into gold and have more than just one gold coin. Before you go and give an exam remember that even if you fail, the result is always Hard Work > Marks.