What is a course grade meant to represent? In U.S. higher education, course letter grades are determined frequently by the number of overall points a student accumulates throughout a term culminating with a final letter grade assigned on an A-F scale. The importance of letter grades to earn degrees, maintain scholarships, and gain access to graduate and professional programs incentivizes students to focus on accumulating points (an extrinsic motivation) rather than focus on learning (an intrinsic motivation) . Furthermore, when we assign points and partial credit to student work and sum the points, there is often no direct connection between the grade students earn and what course learning outcomes (LOs) they have achieved . Grades become a ranking of students against each other rather than an indication of achievement of the LOs by each individual student . This ranking issue is exacerbated in courses that employ curves to determine how many points correspond to a letter grade .