• As a professor, I use grades to help my students identify strengths and areas for improvement.
• Students panic when they get bad grades because they attach their self-worth to their performance.
• I'm working to change that by teaching my students that bad grades can be valuable.

When I was a college sophomore, I stopped looking at my assignments and exam grades to loosen the association between straight A's and my self-worth. At the end of each semester, I checked my course grades before enrolling in the next term, but that was about it. The strategy didn't fix all my overachieving and perfectionistic tendencies, but it did set a foundation for a healthier perspective on success and self-worth.

Now, as a professor, I encourage my doctoral students to develop a similarly detached relationship with their grades, and I'm often surprised by how much resistance this evokes.

Some students balk at the possibility that anything less than an A on any assignment could be inaccurate, urging me to consider their effort more than their performance. But that's not what grades are meant to mean.

Students have rightfully attached a lot of meaning to their grades

Granted, the landscape of higher education has changed dramatically since I was in college and graduate school, especially in terms of the competitiveness of college admissions.

Survey data in the US confirms that getting good grades is a significant stressor for most high school teens. I spent three years working as a staff psychologist for a large university counseling center, so I have seen this stress firsthand, and it can be devastating.

A number of other factors have been cited as contributing to younger generations' stress about grades. For example, parenting styles such as helicopter parenting can put even more pressure on students to perform well.

Social media and its association with increased depression and anxiety among youth also have an effect on self-worth. Finally, increased evidence of racial bias in educational testing has caused students to distrust the enterprise of testing, and rightfully so.

Professors and teachers struggle to see eye-to-eye on grading

I've noticed a widening gap between my and my students' assumptions about grades. To me, grades are a form of feedback in a learning environment. Therefore, students who are learning something new will not get high grades at the outset unless they have a particular strength in the area. No one who ever mastered their craft (or even came close) did so without receiving critical feedback. It's necessary for growth and completely separate from a person's intrinsic worth. In this way, a bad grade can actually be viewed as an opportunity.

Many of my students, on the other hand, consider grades to be an indicator of their career potential and worth. For them, every assignment is a high-stakes test of their fundamental value as a person and a professional. Within this framework, low grades are neither useful nor informative.

As an anonymous student of mine said on a course evaluation last year, "Giving students low grades does not facilitate learning."

Professors I know are changing their techniques to loosen students' grips on grades

Some academics have responded to these challenges by adopting effort-based grading practices. Others, like myself, have abandoned multiple choice exams and closed-book testing for written assignments and oral presentations.

Some of my colleagues now tell their students on the first day of class that everyone will get an A, rendering the resulting A's meaningless in the hopes of facilitating real learning.

I don't have a solution yet, but for now, I continue to use grades as a form of feedback. It is not easy sometimes to be the first teacher who has ever told a student that their writing isn't strong or assign what I think is a fair grade, knowing that it might cause a student to doubt their career potential.

At the end of the day, though, I respect them too much to collude with any system or mindset that confuses grades for goodness.

• I've always been a perfectionist, pushing myself to the extremes for success.
• I felt like a failure when I became a mother, so I had to shift my perspective.
• I now want my daughter to embrace failure and be resilient.

I am a trifecta of eldest daughter stereotypes: overachiever, people-pleaser, and perfectionist. I have always been a rule follower, and as a teenager, I rarely challenged my Indian immigrant parents' strict rules.

By some combination of nature and nurture, I channeled these traits into academics in high school, spending inordinate amounts of time obsessing over my grades (especially that one B+ that ruined my high school valedictorian dreams).

Academic success became the cornerstone of my self-esteem as I entered college, and my priorities reflected this. I turned down invitations to socialize, travel, and explore in order to study, study, and then study some more. I lost more sleep worrying about a possible B or C grade than over developmentally appropriate partying.

Even though my perfectionism helped me get into graduate school and pursue my career of choice as a psychologist, by my 20s, I knew intellectually that putting all my self-worth eggs in the external achievements basket was a recipe for disappointment and anxiety.

However, without a constructive perspective on failure, I was unmotivated to take risks. What I didn't realize until later was that my fear of failure would also affect my parenting.

Achieving my highest professional goal left me unfulfilled

After earning tenure at my university, I was euphoric but soon felt restless. I didn't understand why the achievement was so anticlimactic, but with the help of my therapist, I discovered that I wanted something more, something more meaningful. It turned out that after having spent my entire adult life firmly in the child-free zone, I wanted to have a baby.

A few years later, at age 38, I got pregnant. At the time, I was working six days a week, so I couldn't do my usual overpreparation by reading dozens of books about pregnancy and parenting. I told myself that this was actually a blessing in disguise because it forced me to curb my overachiever tendencies.

Well, even if I had read a library of books on parenting, I would not have avoided the inevitable uncertainty of being a parent. I struggled with breastfeeding, as many mothers do, and in my postpartum period, I filtered this experience through my default lens of success vs. failure. I carried guilt about my breastfeeding challenges for many months, counting them as failures.

A lactation consultant transformed my perspective on parenting

Thankfully, the next day, my daughter's pediatrician referred me to a lactation consultant to whom I will forever be indebted.

She met with me via Zoom, and her long white hair and confident smile instilled hope. She normalized my feelings of failure, imparted an attitude of experimentation and grace, and helped me refocus on the task at hand. She helped me see that what really matters is learning how to be the parent that my daughter needs, not the parent that I or others think I should be.

Of course, this is no easy task. The lexicon of modern parenting styles continues to grow. At the same time, both parents and youth are struggling with mental health, and social media glorifies success. Our educational system further reinforces the connection between self-worth and achievement through grades.

I hope to set a good example for my daughter

While we work on changing our systems and culture to be more compassionate, there are many immediate ways to foster resilience in ourselves and our children.

Some of the strategies I've been implementing include trying things that I'm not good at. I recently took a satire writing class and won't be pitching The Onion anytime soon. I'm also allowing myself to meet an 80% standard on any task that is not related to a current priority and practicing grace toward myself, my husband, and my daughter.

My hope for my daughter has always been that she sees her innate worth reflected in the love of her family and support system and that she is equipped with the tools to face challenges with confidence and courage. Now I know that this starts with me.