On grades, hypocrisy, and the delusion that students love learning for its own sake

A new study tells us that over 65% of students either ignore feedback completely or do not improve as a result of feedback – is anyone surprised?  

Ask any high school teacher how effective feedback is and you’ll get the same answer… somewhere between a tired chuckle and a soul-crushing sigh. Sure, we provide feedback. We may even spend hours writing carefully worded comments like “expand your ideas here” and “great insight—now develop it further.”Then we slap a grade on the top, hand it back, and move on to the next unit because… surprise! The curriculum waits for no one.

And the students? They glance at the mark, calculate whether it’s good enough to avoid a conversation with their parents, and toss the paper in the bottom of their bag where it dies quietly beneath an unwashed PE uniform and a rotting banana.

Feedback, in most classrooms, is a ceremonial artefact…  A ritual. Something we do because we’re told it’s important, not because anyone’s actually using it to improve.

Let’s be honest: students don’t care about feedback because we’ve taught them not to. When we write “excellent insight” or “see me about this paragraph,” but then launch into the next unit the next day, we’ve just signalled that whatever learning happened is already ancient history and is no longer important. Worse, we pair our thoughtful feedback with a grade, which is the educational equivalent of slapping some icing sugar on a raw carrot and calling it dessert. Once that number is there, students don’t care what else you’ve written. Why would they?

Got a 92? Awesome. It’s an A. Don’t need to read your comments, Miss, I’m obviously a genius.
Got a 54? Whatever. It’s a pass. Move on.
Got a 39? Let’s be honest, I stopped reading after “you need to…”

And yet we keep doing it. We pour our professional energy into writing feedback that we know students will ignore. Why? Because we cling to the delusion that students are naturally curious and will apply feedback out of sheer love of learning.

News flash…. They won’t.
Students never do more work than is necessary. And why should they? The system literally trains them to aim for the grade, not the growth. Students treat feedback like an IKEA instruction manual – it looks helpful, sits unread, and only gets used when everything’s already falling apart.

Imagine a world where students had to do something radical with their feedback, like actually use it. Imagine this: you give feedback, the student acts on it, improves their work, and resubmits it. Radical, isn’t it?

It happens. Not often, but there are teachers out there who are heroic, sleep-deprived, and probably slightly unhinged, and do this on purpose. They make students focus on the feedback, implement it, and give them a shot at improving their grade. You know, like learning really matters.

Of course, this takes work. It’s harder than just marking it once and being done with it. And let’s be honest: most teachers are either too busy, too burned out, or too resigned to the hamster wheel of term-time survival to make this happen. I get it. More work sounds like the worst possible solution to anything.

But if we’re not going to make students use feedback, what exactly are we doing here?

Here’s the part no one likes to say out loud: grades kill feedback. Worse, they kill learning.

A high grade gives students a false sense of mastery.
“90%? I’m a genius. Don’t need to do anything else.”
Yeah, 90% is a good grade, but what about the other 10%? You know, the part you didn’t get?

On the flip side, a low grade breeds apathy. “Too hard, not worth trying again.”
Either way, the feedback becomes background noise, like hold music during a call you don’t want to be on.

So, here’s an idea: stop giving grades altogether. What if students only got encouraging, constructive, actionable feedback? No numbers. Just “here’s what you did well, and here’s what you can do to improve.”

Suddenly, the only thing that matters is growth. Not status. Not rank. Just learning. It sets a more even playing field. It removes the scoreboard until the only game that matters, senior assessment, (HSC, WACE, SAT, ACT) kicks in. Because let’s be honest: competition doesn’t matter until it actually matters. So why do we bake competition into every test from Year 7? We claim to care about equity, yet we rank 13-year-olds as if they were in the Hunger Games.

Here’s the kicker. Feedback works the same way as everything else in school: if you want students to do it, you have to build it in.

You can’t just hope they’ll revisit that essay or rework that math problem for the sheer joy of improvement. They won’t. Not because they’re lazy or bad or ungrateful. Because they’re human, and humans take the path of least resistance, especially when the system lets them.

So, you want students to use your feedback? Build in the time. Make the second draft count. Make improvement visible. Make it part of the process, not an afterthought.

Want them to value feedback? Remove the grade and make the growth the thing that gets rewarded.

The Hypocrisy We Have Learned to Live With

We tell students that learning matters more than marks. Then we hand them a report card and say, “You got a B+. Congrats.”

We tell them feedback is the key to improvement. Then we give them comments on a task we’ll never look at again.

We say learning is a journey. Then we grade their suitcase before they’ve packed it properly.

Teachers know this. Students definitely know this. And yet, we keep pretending like feedback will magically change lives, without changing anything else.

Another hard truth – only you can decide if it is worth it. Resubmissions take time. Eliminating grades takes courage. Making feedback matter takes effort.

Is it worth it?

If you believe that school should be more than a ranking system… yes.

If you believe that students can improve when given a chance… yes.

If you believe that learning is messy and nonlinear and human… yes again.

But if you think feedback is going to work just because you will it into existence, because you wrote it in neat red pen with two stars and a wish, then you’re dreaming. Feedback doesn’t work unless we make it work.

The good news? You can start small. Pick one task, one unit, one moment where feedback leads to revision. Build it, require it, honour it, and show students that their thinking matters after the grade (or better yet, without it).

Because the truth is: students don’t need more feedback, they need fewer excuses not to use it.