Background

Having spent over 15 years in the Iranian education system, it has been quite of an unpleasant experience. Students go through a very brothersome process of studying for an University Exam called Konkour, which is ruled by a big group of people looking to earn money off poor students.

The concept of the Iranian Grading system becomes more prominent when students enroll in a University academic program.

The grading system

The grading system here is basically the same as France’s. The grading is done on a scale of 0-20. This is unlike some other grading systems where letters are used to represent grades, i.e. A, B, C, etc.

In most cases, the precision of the grade has a precision of two decimal places. Which means seeing grades like 18.23, 18.41 and such is pretty common.

The issues

It has been quite a while since I have started my Bachelor’s academic journey. And I have started to notice some issues with the grading system.

You can’t precisely measure knowledge

The fact that the system has the precision of two decimal places means that it claims that it is possible to very precisely score students. This is inherently a error-prone process because it is impossible to completely examine the knowledge of students based on a limited tools such as an final exam.

Burn out

This is one of the issues that can be felt throughout the courses. In the process of a course, you suddenly find yourself drifting away from the real purpose of the courses. Instead of aiming to learn the concepts, you suddenly find yourself forcing yourself to get that extra 0.1 points. These accumalated strehtches have personally caused me to subconciously start to avoid that subject even after the course is over.

Perfectionism

The