Three more minutes until my Uber arrives. My Apple Watch tells me that I’ve burned 547 calories today. I can track my Amazon packages from across the globe. We live in a hyperconnected world built on instant feedback. Yet at Taipei American School (TAS), if I ask for my current history grade, I only have access to outdated grades on Powerschool. In a world built on instant feedback, how can students be expected to take ownership of their learning when they’re denied access to know their progress?

For most of the school year, TAS limits student access to overall grades on Powerschool, only revealing individual grades for separate assignments on Canvas. The administration makes the argument that by limiting access to overall grades, they prevent students from obsessing over numerical values, which allows them to focus on learning. In an interview with Mr. Crawford, an Upper School English teacher at TAS, he explained that administrators at his previous school in Vietnam found that “some students and parents were accessing the gradebook hundreds of times a week,” which they believed “cause[d] stress” and “encourage[d] a greater focus on grades at the expense of learning.”

 Ms. Read, the Upper School Principal, shares a similar concern. She said, “We want students to concentrate more on their learning. Grades are not necessarily indicative of more learning – they simply aren’t… we’ve all been in that class where we got a lot out of it but didn’t do well on the assessment.” She also points out that “research has shown that when you give people grades and written feedback about how they’ve done, they tend to ignore the feedback and only look at grades.” While Ms. Read’s concern is true, limiting grade access shifts the problem from distraction and replaces it with stress and uncertainty. 

Limiting access to overall grades creates a different kind of stress, which might even be worse than what the administration fears. When TAS limits access to overall grades, it does not make stress go away; it just turns into something that bothers students constantly due to uncertainty. Are we passing or not? Is this enough effort, or should I be worried? These thoughts run through our heads all semester. As Panadero and Sánchez-Iglesias (2025) explain, “if students perceive grades as critical but feel a lack of control, negative emotions like anxiety or hopelessness may arise, potentially diminishing academic performance and motivation.” This is exactly what happens. Students know that grades matter, yet they have no information to act on, nor do they have control over it, leading to a decline in motivation and performance.

Additional research supports this. A study by de Berker et al. (2016) found that it is uncertainty itself, rather than definite bad news, that creates the most stress. In their experiment, the participants who had a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock experienced the highest level of stress, while those who knew that they would definitely receive a shock (100%) or definitely not (0% chance) were much less stressed. As lead researcher Archy de Berker explained, “ It’s much worse not knowing you’re going to get a shock than knowing you definitely will or won’t” (UCL News, 2016). The same principle applies to grades. Just as participants experienced maximum stress when they were uncertain if a shock was coming, students experience maximum stress when they are left guessing whether they are passing or failing. When students know they’re failing, they can do something about it. They can find a tutor or ask a teacher for help; however, when students are kept in the dark, they are left feeling helpless and uncertain about their performance – which is the worst kind of anxiety. 

As experts continue to debate on grade policies and their effects on stress and motivation, TAS should create a Grade Transparency Task Force consisting of students, faculty, parents and administrators. Task force members will focus on gathering feedback and ideas through surveys. They will also conduct studies on how transparent grade access affects student stress and motivation, and test different grade access systems – such as bi-weekly grade updates starting in the middle of the semester – before deciding on a long-term policy. This way, the school can keep its main focus on learning while giving students the information they need to improve. The ultimate goal of the task force should be to design a policy that helps students understand their progress, encourages self-reflection, and gives students a sense of control over their learning rather than leaving students uncertain and creating more stress. Education should empower students to take ownership of their learning journey, including the freedom to understand their own progress.