I'm a professor at Pepperdine, and my students attach their self-worth to their grades. I'm struggling to change that.

• As a professor, I use grades to help my students identify strengths and areas for improvement.
• Students panic when they get bad grades because they attach their self-worth to their performance.
• I'm working to change that by teaching my students that bad grades can be valuable.

When I was a college sophomore, I stopped looking at my assignments and exam grades to loosen the association between straight A's and my self-worth. At the end of each semester, I checked my course grades before enrolling in the next term, but that was about it. The strategy didn't fix all my overachieving and perfectionistic tendencies, but it did set a foundation for a healthier perspective on success and self-worth.

Now, as a professor, I encourage my doctoral students to develop a similarly detached relationship with their grades, and I'm often surprised by how much resistance this evokes.

Some students balk at the possibility that anything less than an A on any assignment could be inaccurate, urging me to consider their effort more than their performance. But that's not what grades are meant to mean.

Students have rightfully attached a lot of meaning to their grades

Granted, the landscape of higher education has changed dramatically since I was in college and graduate school, especially in terms of the competitiveness of college admissions.

Survey data in the US confirms that getting good grades is a significant stressor for most high school teens. I spent three years working as a staff psychologist for a large university counseling center, so I have seen this stress firsthand, and it can be devastating.

A number of other factors have been cited as contributing to younger generations' stress about grades. For example, parenting styles such as helicopter parenting can put even more pressure on students to perform well.

Social media and its association with increased depression and anxiety among youth also have an effect on self-worth. Finally, increased evidence of racial bias in educational testing has caused students to distrust the enterprise of testing, and rightfully so.

Professors and teachers struggle to see eye-to-eye on grading

I've noticed a widening gap between my and my students' assumptions about grades. To me, grades are a form of feedback in a learning environment. Therefore, students who are learning something new will not get high grades at the outset unless they have a particular strength in the area. No one who ever mastered their craft (or even came close) did so without receiving critical feedback. It's necessary for growth and completely separate from a person's intrinsic worth. In this way, a bad grade can actually be viewed as an opportunity.

Many of my students, on the other hand, consider grades to be an indicator of their career potential and worth. For them, every assignment is a high-stakes test of their fundamental value as a person and a professional. Within this framework, low grades are neither useful nor informative.

As an anonymous student of mine said on a course evaluation last year, "Giving students low grades does not facilitate learning."

Professors I know are changing their techniques to loosen students' grips on grades

Some academics have responded to these challenges by adopting effort-based grading practices. Others, like myself, have abandoned multiple choice exams and closed-book testing for written assignments and oral presentations.

Some of my colleagues now tell their students on the first day of class that everyone will get an A, rendering the resulting A's meaningless in the hopes of facilitating real learning.

I don't have a solution yet, but for now, I continue to use grades as a form of feedback. It is not easy sometimes to be the first teacher who has ever told a student that their writing isn't strong or assign what I think is a fair grade, knowing that it might cause a student to doubt their career potential.

At the end of the day, though, I respect them too much to collude with any system or mindset that confuses grades for goodness.