Sometimes I feel as though our lives are becoming nothing more than standardized tests.

From middle school through high school we spend days, perhaps even weeks, preparing for and taking exams like the ACT and the SATs. However, we’re not judged on merit, creativity or innovation. We’re judged solely upon our raw intellectual abilities relative to other test-takers.

College is a little more like an open-ended essay than it once was. Students are more free to explore subjects of interest with little interference, but what good is freedom without free time?

My parents are always telling me I don’t call them enough, that “I can spare 30 seconds of my time to talk to them,” but truth be told, I can’t always. I don’t even have enough time for myself. I’ve given up nearly every leisure activity I used to partake in for the sake of chasing a grade.

In spite of this, I sometimes do enjoy the push and the stress, as many of you probably do as well. Now that we’re in college, as my English teacher would say, “we’re forced to hump through the hoops of academia” more than ever.

My only true contention is that it sometimes feels like swimming against a current. You work and you persevere, but if you take even a moment’s rest, then you’ve already lost several yards of progress. I just want to know when, and if, we can ever expect relief … or if society is insistent upon us burning our #2B pencils down to their kneaded erasers.

While brainstorming this column, I wanted to think of a happy ending for it. Something to the effect of, “yeah, things will be just fine and one day we’ll all be living out our dreams for all our hard work and strife.” Unfortunately, it only gets tougher from here on out.

In the future, many of us can anticipate the promising workloads and quotas of graduate, medical or law schools. We are all slaves to the deity of deadlines. Perhaps one day, when ink becomes as scarce a commodity as fossil fuels, we’ll all retire from this hamster wheel we’ve come to know as “life.”

On a more uplifting note, there are people advocating for a different system of learning in classrooms. In New York City, there was once mention of instituting a “portfolio system” into elementary schools. There are even colleges that don’t give out grades! Bennington, Hampshire, Massachusetts, Santa Cruz and Reed colleges are just a few institutions in the United States where these gradeless policies have been put forth successfully.

If it’s been done there, why can’t we exercise that option here at Binghamton, too? I would love to see that happen.

Quite frankly, I don’t think that grades are all school is really about. I think education is, in fact, a journey of self-exploration in which one challenges him- or herself and fosters a true appreciation for learning that persists not just throughout school, but throughout life. You don’t need grades to tell you how to do that.