Week 15 Growth Mindset: OU and Me

Caption: The library at The University of Oklahoma. Link.

I think that there are definitely some areas in which OU could improve their approach to growth mindset. However, I think that there are some things about colleges that inherently can't be changed and will always go against growth mindset. GPAs are necessary and cannot be abolished altogether, but they encourage students to try and achieve a certain grade instead of to try and learn. I think one way of maybe helping this would be to encourage students to learn from their mistakes. If students do poorly on a test, maybe they can retake the test and write a paper over what they learned to show that they are learning form their mistakes instead of just being punished by them. This way, GPA is still held up but there are more ways to encourage learning from mistakes. It's hard to think of ways that the university as a whole can encourage learning and growth, but I think that professors can encourage this by putting less pressure on students to perform well on tests and put more emphasis on assignments that encourage them to better understand the base topics that they are in the classes for. College seems to inherently not encourage growth mindset because of the emphasis on getting good grades instead of learning the topics. If less emphasis was put on testing, I think that this could be combatted.