Why do we use grad[e]s to be a measure of our knowledge & intelligence?

It wasn’t always this way, as you can learn in this fascinating article about the history of grades: bit.ly/history-of-grading (BC community access). Grading in the US evolved from European scholastic competitions, which worked something more like sports playoffs; the winners of final brackets went on to be supported by academic institutions for life. Yale was the first in the US to use a 4-point scale: “2” was satisfactory. Harvard and William & Mary adopted it. They often included non-academic criteria; a “0” at William & Mary meant “those who learned little or nothing… on account of excessive idleness.” K-12 schools followed suit. At first, grades were purely an internal pedagogical tool. Around 1900 as schooling became universal, grading became systematized as way to communicate externally.