I’m a nerd. I loved school. I loved grades. And I wasn’t even the kind of kid who bragged about them – they were my own personal treasure that I hoarded like Scrooge McDuck hoarded gold.

But I don’t love being scored in the workplace. I guess even when you get the equivalent of a 90% on a workplace performance evaluation, it feels like the whole conversation is about the 10 percent you got wrong rather than the 90 percent you got right. Teachers don’t typically write comments next to the questions you get wrong, “Needs improvement on understanding obtuse angles.” They just put a big red X and move on. It’s your responsibility to look back at that and go “Oh I fucked that up. Maybe I should learn how to do that.”

It’s just so tedious and bureaucratic, like an IRS audit where you forgot to bring the shoebox of receipts from under your bed. Your supervisor walks you through, step by step, reading a Big Brother mysterious judgment of you. That’s right YOU, not your performance but YOU. That’s how it feels. The language is unfamiliar – things you didn’t even know you were being judged on. They put numerical values on qualitative ideas such as communication, teamwork, leadership and problem solving. It makes me wish I worked for The New School. How do you think their job performance evaluations go down?

There’s no midterm. No study guide. Why can’t my boss just write 90% at the top next to a giant “A” or even “B+”? I would feel so much more comfortable. And then I could read through it alone later on to be privately mortified by my own misconduct.