Why Grades Shouldn't Be the End Goal of Studying

Extrinsic value: the reason from outside you

Grades are the original extrinsic motivator. You study not because the material itself pulls you in, but because a number gets attached to how well you performed, and that number has consequences: university offers, parental approval, your own sense of not falling behind. None of that requires you to actually care about the subject. It just requires you to care about the number.

Study apps borrowed the same trick and turned it into a product. Streaks, XP, badges, leaderboards, points, they're all the same move: attach a small external reward to the act of showing up, so the app can hook you the way the grade already does, except now for opening an app instead of learning a subject.

Why it collapses

Here's the problem with any motivation borrowed from outside you: it only works as long as whatever's administering it is still there. Take the grade away, and a lot of students lose the reason they were studying in the first place, not because they stopped caring about their future, necessarily, but because the number was doing the motivational work the subject itself never got the chance to do. Take a streak away (miss one day, lose 40 days of "progress") and the same thing happens, except now it's worse: the app trained you to chase the number, and the moment the number resets, so does your reason to open the app at all.

This isn't hypothetical. It's a big part of why gamified study apps have a retention cliff: once the novelty of the badge fades or a student breaks a streak, there's often nothing left underneath, because nothing underneath it was ever built. If you'd like the deeper research on why gamification specifically backfires this way, I wrote about it here.

Intrinsic value: the reason that's actually yours

The alternative is motivation that doesn't need anyone administering it: intrinsic value. You study something because you're actually interested in it, not because a badge is waiting on the other side. This isn't a new idea, it's the backbone of self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), one of the most replicated frameworks in motivation psychology: people sustain effort far longer, and with far less resentment, when the activity itself feels worth doing, not just its reward.

The problem is most subjects don't arrive pre-loaded with interest. Nobody's born caring about the mechanics of taxation or the physics of force. So the real question isn't "how do we make studying fun with points," it's "how do we make the actual subject matter to this specific student."

Interest-based mapping: relatability makes it easier to focus, and to understand

This is what Phase 2 of the Norudit Sequence does, and the core idea behind it is simple: it's all about relatability. You learn more, and faster, when new material is related to something you already know and already enjoy, and that does two separate jobs at once.

It's easier to focus, because you actually want to know the answer. Interest reliably increases how much attention you give something and how deeply you process it (Hidi & Renninger, 2006) — a hook that's personally relevant is what turns passing curiosity into sustained attention.

And it's easier to understand, because you're not building the concept from nothing, you're relating it to a concept you've already grasped. This is close to the whole point of Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning: "the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows" (Ausubel, 1968). It isn't just theory either. In a well-known study, poor readers with strong baseball knowledge understood a baseball-themed passage better than strong readers with no baseball knowledge (Recht & Leslie, 1988) — prior knowledge did more work than raw reading ability.

Take force, in physics. Taught straight, it's F = ma and a diagram, a new idea with nothing to hang it on. Mapped onto interest, if the student's into comics, the question becomes: how much force would Superman actually need to lift the Earth? Now the physics isn't arriving cold. It's attaching itself to a character the student already understands in detail, which does double duty: it's the reason to want the answer, and it's the scaffolding that makes the answer easier to actually grasp.

Or economics, taught through manhwa: you've just been transmigrated into your favourite Korean web-comic world, and you've been handed the country to run. How do you actually structure taxes so the kingdom doesn't collapse? It's still a real economics question, marginal rates, incidence, avoidance, but the student already has a working picture of that world in their head, so the new concept has somewhere to land instead of floating on its own.

You've probably heard, or said, the classic complaint: "why do I need to learn this? I'll never use it in real life." That complaint is usually a relatability problem, not a subject problem. Educators tend to forget to link what's being taught to the environment or interests of the students actually in front of them. It's the same reason students consistently do better with teachers they like: a lot of that isn't really the teacher's personality, it's how relatable they are, how much they bother to connect the material to something the student already has a foothold in.

Why this beats engagement farming

The difference between this and streaks/badges isn't subtle: engagement farming manufactures a feeling of progress that lives entirely inside the app, points that mean nothing the moment you close it. Interest-based mapping doesn't manufacture anything. It finds a want that already exists in the student and routes the subject through it, and because it's relating the new material to something the student already understands, it isn't just easier to want to do, it's easier to actually learn. The motivation isn't borrowed, it's theirs, so it doesn't evaporate when the app isn't watching.

And the outcomes actually track this: a student who wants to know how much force Superman would need doesn't need a streak to keep going, they're going to work through the physics because they want the answer. That's the whole difference between a student who's engaged and a student who's being managed.

If you'd like to see how this fits with the rest of the science the method is built on, read the other four principles here.

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Read more

• The other four principles Norudit's method is built on: Built on the Science of Memory
• Why gamification backfires and what Norudit does instead: The Distraction Machine
• The design philosophy behind keeping the interface this quiet: Calm by Design