Pushkin.
I want you to think back to your school days for a second.
What was the worst grade you ever got?
How did it make you feel?
And now think about the best grade.
How was that?
Grades.
Even decades after graduation, we can still remember what those marks felt like.
And it makes sense that grades affect us so deeply because they're important.
I mean, They're kind of synonymous with education.
Aren't they?
Well, it turns out, not really.
In fact, grades are a relatively new invention.
For almost seven centuries, schools got by without them.
As a professor myself, I find that incomprehensible.
I mean,
generation after generation of scholars completed their studies without anything akin to a grade point average.
How could my predecessors tell students apart?
How did they sort pupils who worked really, really hard from those who just phoned it in?
Back in 1785, all that changed.