Around this time in first year, I was fed up. I was getting the lowest grades I had ever gotten in my life and I was driving myself crazy trying to succeed. I turned to my main tutor. I thought tutors were supposed to guide you toward success. In my experience, this was not the case.

I got a decent grade on every paper I wrote in FYP. Except for the papers marked by my main tutor. With her, my grades were much lower, and only once approached the letter grade I got on every other paper. I met with her three times over the year and often asked for advice after tutorial. I asked her what I could be doing better, how I could improve my writing, and why the papers I wrote for her suffered compared to my papers for other tutors.

The final time I went to her office hours, I asked her why I wasn’t improving even though I was fixing the things she criticized in my previous papers. This meeting is burned in my memory: she said, “sometimes progress doesn’t mean better grades.” I was so confused. She told me to keep trying. My grades from her never improved.

After that, I stopped asking. I was discouraged and felt silly for putting emphasis on my grades. Sometimesprogress isn’t linear and you struggle to get where you’re going. Maybe that was the takeaway. Clearly the program was focused on a more sophisticated way of learning, right?

I’ve thought about it a lot. For a while, I really beat myself up for caring about my grades, as if my success mattering to me made me less of an intellectual. But now I know I was right to be frustrated about this. In the real world, grades matter. They have financial implications and they can open up opportunities for the future.

At King’s, to keep an entrance scholarship, your GPA must be 3.7 (A-). When I was in first year, you had to keep this GPA from first year through fourth year. The same requirements were set for current third-years when they were in FYP. This year, there is no mention on the King’s website of a required GPA for first year, but the 3.7 requirement remains for years two through four. Also, grad schools’ admissions across Canada usually require a minimum GPA of 3.0. Scholarships for grad schools consider applicants’ grades. All this to say, my FYP grades were important.

I’m not saying she should have just handed me a higher grade. I’m not afraid of hard work. But hard work to do better at… what? She never taught me what or how to do better, even when I asked directly. My FYP marks are currently the worst on my transcript.

This particular tutor no longer works here. But this is my issue with the program: there are no rubrics, no checklists, nothing to indicate what they expect of you. The marks you get depend heavily on your tutor. Some tutors (but not most) tell you what they want. Others expect you to read their minds. It’s not just the grading; it’s the feedback, too. In my papers, a few tutors would make notes at the end of the paper simply saying “vague” or “unclear.” I don’t think I have to clarify the irony there.

A friend of mine was told by one of his tutors that in order for his essay to get an A, he had to “imagine [his] essay was a river” and was offered no other explanation.

Guidelines, like rubrics or criteria charts, do not mean students won’t work hard or that their writing will be less individual. Not everyone has the courage to ask for clarification; speaking to professors in first year can be daunting. In my case, even when I did ask for clarification, I did not get any specific answers.

I am a stronger critical thinker because of FYP, but no thanks to its grading system. I found that FYP tries to distance itself from the notion that grades are important—instead, it emphasizes discovery and thought. This attitude ignores how grades are used in the real world and assumes everyone is in the same boat financially. They’re not. For a lot of people, good grades are more than a pat on the back. They are a ticket to a means to achieve their goals.

I’m not saying I deserved better grades on those papers, but I deserved to know how to do better. Students should be given the tools and guidance necessary to improve their work and grades. That’s part of an educator’s job. FYP tutors, for the most part, do not do that.

It’s too bad. FYP is a great program that opened my mind to different ways of thinking. It fosters community amongst students and I made great friendships while studying. I learned a lot, maybe the most, from my peers. Unfortunately, the grading system is so arbitrary. I was so preoccupied, frustrated and discouraged while going through the program, I felt I could not fully enjoy all the beautiful things about FYP.

I sincerely, perhaps naively, hope this is not a problem in FYP now. If it is, don’t wait until the end of the year to speak up. Take it to the program director, Neil Robertson. Or take it to President Lahey, or the KSU.

And tutors: recognize the role you play in making or breaking students’ aspirations. Don’t make them feel small-minded for caring about their marks, help them understand how to do better. Alternatively, if the program actually wants students to care about the content more than their grades, then FYP grades should be curved. Or, omitted from GPA calculations entirely.