Contract Grading and the Reformation

Years ago I read a book about European history and the Protestant Reformation.  It posed the modern question: what if we found scientific evidence that your diet and exercise habits have absolutely no influence whatsoever on your long-term health prospects?  That eating a "balanced diet" definitively does NOT prevent cancer, or any other disease? That heart attacks happen quasi-randomly, whether or not you eat extra-cheese pizzas, no matter whether you jog every day or merely every gubernatorial administration?  

Americans worry incessantly about how diet and exercise affect their long-term health - including  people without any actual health problems.  They are helped along by ignorant gossip from their well-meaning friends, by journalists who carefully misinterpret scientific "studies" for maximum dramah, and by the diet-industrial complex who have a financial interest in stoking people's fears.  "Am I eating right to protect myself from cancer and heart disease?"  The answer most people come up with is a shameful "no".  

Well, the European history book said, that's how the Protestant Reformation succeeded.  Europeans in the 1400s were just as worried about how their daily actions might lead to eternal damnation as we are about how what we eat might cause disease.  They were egged on by priests who proclaimed a "The Good Place"-style system by which all actions are judged by God and his minions.  Instead of joining weight-watchers or buying books by diet gurus, people bought indulgences to save their souls.

But the Reformation preached that all the worrying wasn't relevant.  You're Saved, and going to heaven.  Or not, but if not there's nothing to be done about it anyway, God either Saved you at birth or He didn't. Don't worry about your soul.  God'll take care of it.  You take care of plowing the fields and providing for your kids.  

Now put this conversation into the context of college-bound high school students.  They worry incessantly about how their daily work habits might affect their grades and college prospects.  They're egged on by ignorant gossip among their peers, and among their parents' peers.  How many times have I talked to a 14 year old's parent, not about what activities the 14 year old might enjoy, not about what classes match their interests or their abilities, but about what will maximize the 14 year old's college resume and GPA?  How often does a senior who loathes math take yet another math course, then spend innumerous sullen hours doing the hated work for that math course, and stressing because they're getting Bs on the tests?*  When that senior has for four years gazed wistfully at the ceramics course, or beginning strings, or journalism, but parents and other trusted adults explained that they're borderline for admission to their dream college, and the only way to get off the borderline is to take some challenging "core" courses and get As.  

*And causing more stress among their peers with their contagious despondence.

How would such students feel if trusted advisors uniformly told them that college admission is truthfully a crap shoot, that they're in (or not) regardless of whether they have an A or a B in English?  That their dream college wants to see them take classes they love, not yet another year of hated French?  That the college they attend is predestined, unchangeable, and will only be revealed - not earned, revealed! - in March of the senior year?

I can't control the zeitgeist surrounding college admission.  I can, though, nail my "everyone gets an A-minus" AP physics contract to the door of the cathedral.  

Think of the weight off of students' minds once they sign their contract.  It makes no difference in their grade if they got a 3/10 or a 9/10 on last night's problem set.  All the "3/10" means is that they'll come in to redo the problem until they understand it.  The advantage to strong test performance is fewer corrections to do, not a higher grade, 'cause the grade is an A-minus no matter what.  

So no one whines that the course is too hard, or that the work is too much.  Every student knows that any time they want, they can just request a move to the general course, which will be far easier.  (But, except in rare cases, they don't request that move!)  They know that as long as they *do* the assigned work, they have the Grace of an A-minus waiting for them.  And that the A-minus will never, ever turn in to an A on the next report, no matter how much more performative work they do, or how many indulgences they attempt to purchase.