Recently, the Minnesota Daily published an article on the inflating GPA at the University of Minnesota.

Within the Feb. 12 Minnesota Daily article, titled “Grades edge up, fuel old debate,” it was discussed that “students focus more on grades and less on critical thinking.”

Of course college students don’t care about learning. They’ve been taught since they were 6 years old that A’s and a 4.0 GPA are the definition of human intelligence and success.

The kids who don’t do well in school are sectioned off and called slow, unsuccessful, and/or remedial. These students are told that they are essentially not as intelligent as their counterparts. Getting lower grades makes students feel that they, too, will be unsuccessful and less intelligent than their peers getting higher grades.

Now, tens of thousands of students who used to be A or B students and in the top half of their high school classes are competing with each other for the highest GPA.

It doesn’t actually matter if you learn anything in your classes, because learning is not reflected in the grade; only midterm and final test scores are reflected.

It’s a system that does not stress learning and instead stresses the regurgitation of facts taught by a lecturer or some Ivy League textbook author.

The University will continue to have higher GPAs. It can continue to raise the ACT and GPA requirements to make it into the University so it can brag and say, “This is the smartest class to enter the University of Minnesota!” It’s a filler statement based on scores that will never be able to actually reflect a human’s intelligence.

Students will continue to strive for these higher scores and allow themselves to be defined by these scores because it’s what they’ve been taught since they first entered school.

But students won’t actually be smarter. And students won’t care about learning, because they are a part of a system that doesn’t care about learning.