I teach at a local university's school of business. It's highly selective, so they kids we get have always been the smartest kids in every class their whole lives. Until--bam! They end up in a room of similarly successful kids. The school imposes a mandatory median of 3.2 for the class, and, being old-fashioned, we only go to 4.0.
That means for the first time in their lives, these kids are going to get less than perfect grades. Anxiety is high, to say the least.
A couple years ago, I tried telling the kids that grades weren't really all that important, in the sense that (a) they don't define you; and (b) once you get out of school nobody's going to care what grade you got in my class; they are going to care what you can
do. I may as well have been talking to the wall. In my post-class instructor evaluations, several of the kids said they were
offended that I had taken such a cavalier attitude about the importance of grades. One young lady even said "My grades
do define me!"
And I've had kids come to see me, crying, telling me that they didn't know how they were going to explain their 3.2 grade to their parents. and . . . I've even had a young lady come see me, dressed for, shall we say, "success," to negotiate her grades. That meeting took place in the hall
outside my office with my teaching assistant in attendance!
My wife has a theory: we need to teach kids to fail, because most of life is failure. It's a biological imperative. Too many kids glide from one illusory success to the next illusory success, until they smack into the brick wall of reality, ill-prepared. When I was growing up, I was a skinny, uncoordinated little kid (hard to believe now), horrible at stick and ball sports. But I wanted to play, so I went through years of warming the bench, playing right field, and having grounders go between my legs to let the winning run score. I was a complete failure as an athlete, and learning to deal with that gave me a real advantage later in life.