You just stepped out of a huge test. Your mind is running with doubts: Was your answer for question 25 wrong? Did you get anything right with the multiple-answers-possible questions? You flunked it, you’re sure, so you flock to the throng of your classmates like a sheep, ready to share your misery with them.

The next class test scores are out and everybody races onto Student Connect. “What did you get? What did you get?” One person, then the next, comes up to you for your results. Across the classroom you hear another kid say, “I did sooo bad on the test. I got 90%!” Now you want to curl your arms over your head and sink beneath the desk. You actually did badly. And you don’t want to tell anyone, but it feels like everyone wants to know.

At a school as competitive as Oak Park High School, there is bound to be a lot of attention on grades and test scores. It’s almost a habit to ask your fellow students how they did on a test, then mentally place that side-by-side with yours and decide who’s academically superior. This is a negative behavior that can harm mental health, create a toxic school environment and lead to poor learning.

In a study on the introduction of grading to Swedish schools, it was found that it caused increased stress, decreased life satisfaction and psychosomatic symptoms. With the pressure to perform well constantly on students, it is no wonder our self-worth starts degrading.

Not only do you think negatively about yourself, but others around you seem to pray for your downfall too. People ask about your score even if they don’t really care. If you do well, you get a “Good job!” If not, well, you get an “Oh, you’ll do better next time.” or “No, that’s still really good!”. The former provides confidence, while the latter leaves you feeling mollified in all the wrong ways.

This is because of a desire for validation. “[Validation] gives us that rush of positive emotions, especially pride and feeling pleased and worthwhile and valuable, but quickly fades,” Lora Park, a psychology professor at the University of Buffalo, said. As group animals, humans need community. And as in the natural world, a community comes with competition.

Furthermore, at some high schools, class rankings organize students by grades. We’re lucky at OPHS not to have to deal with this. Class ranking creates a social hierarchy at school, placing those who may feel less suited to learning at the bottom and those who only care about a letter in their transcript at the top.

This is a flawed system in many ways. It fosters an environment where instead of supporting and helping each other grow, students constantly work to push their peers down and thus themselves up.

In addition, class rankings don’t measure how well someone will actually do once they are out in society. As Harvard Graduate School of Education states, different teachers have different grading standards. Where one teacher may give you an A, another one who teaches the same class may give you a B. This blur creates “grade fog,” where grades have no meaning because of how many factors influence them.

“A student who writes an A-quality essay but hands it in late gets her writing downgraded to a B, and the student who writes a B-quality essay turned in by the deadline receives a B,” author Joe Feldman said. “There’s nothing to distinguish those two B grades, although those students have very different levels of content mastery.”

Each student has different innate skills. Someone may be highly intelligent but cave beneath the pressure of tests. Someone may be good at test-taking but ultimately feel lost when they have to find a job. To use one system to measure them all is inaccurate and dangerous.

This danger comes into full play with the risk of suicide. According to Henry A. Spiller’s study, there was a decrease in suicide attempts during the non-school summer months and an increase during the school year for people aged 10-18. These results weren’t found in older people out of school.

While it cannot be assumed that school is the only factor for mental health struggles, it definitely doesn’t help. Students have packed schedules outside of school and after a sports game or music class, they definitely don’t want to hunker down for hours of studying.

This can lead to procrastination, greatly increasing stress especially if you are completing all your assignments right before the deadline. In extreme cases, students will pull all-nighters to get all their work done, which over time is damaging to mental and physical health. Students sacrifice too much of their happiness to ensure their grades don’t slip.

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts and actions, don’t be afraid to reach out to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

Now, there is some justification in the emphasis on grades. Good grades can help with college admissions, scholarships and even have a link to better lifetime earnings. Failing a class can harm someone’s chances of getting into a selective university, as can doing poorly on the SAT or ACT with some schools.

But grades are not everything your dream school is looking for. They want someone who has lived, who will live and make an impact with their degree, not someone bogged down by the 0.1% difference between grades.

“Students often focus on getting in rather than representing themselves authentically. This is the moment to think deeply about who you are and what matters to you,” Stanford University’s admissions officers said. “In the strongest applications we read, a student’s genuine voice stands out.”

The truth is: students don’t study to learn. Today, it’s hard not to focus on your scores when your friends, parents, teachers and future colleges or universities nag you about them. Instead of being incentivized by an internal motivator—to learn, students are incentivized by external rewards or punishments—good or bad grades.

“When I encounter students after they have graduated, they almost always remember what grade they received in my class; yet when I ask about what concepts they learned, they hesitate before answering,” Harvard Business Publishing Education teacher Gerald E. Knesek said.

Remember, in the long run, it doesn’t matter if you got a worse grade than your one friend on that one test in that one class in junior year. A slight difference in points does not mean you didn’t learn or listen in class. It doesn’t make you a shabbier student.

Stop asking your friends what they got after a test and don’t pester them to tell you. Strive for the best you can do and take the courses that spark your passion, not just the ones that will boost your GPA. Grades are not you.