As Nat Hillard awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found that the world felt a bit different. The test he took only several days ago sat on his dresser. He had picked it up the previous evening, but he hadn’t looked at the grade yet.

Rolling over to face it, however, he found that the paper had no evidence of a grade at all. There was a red circle, but there was nothing in it. The point tallies were simply missing.

“Surely, this is a mistake!” he yelled, terror in his voice. He quickly logged onto Coursework, only to find a notice: The Land of Stanfordia will no longer issue grades.

And just then, Nat heard a knock on the door. It was a professor, a man he didn’t know but had surely seen many times before. The man was crying, his head buried in his hands. “The balloons!” he cried. “Our grade balloons! How will we inflate them? All the grades are gone from Stanfordia!”

A crash interrupted his lament. A student in the background, wearing a Stanford sweatshirt, had flipped over a car and was busy pouring lighter fluid over it. She had a crazed look in her eye. She threw the match down on the lighter fluid and the blazing contour of a bright “A+” erupted on the pavement. “With no grade on my test, I have nothing to argue with the professor over,” she yelled. “I know I got at least an A, but how will I know if I got an A+?!”

She walked over to the professor that had just knocked on Nat’s door and proceeded to ask him a series of questions about the material on the test. His only answers were a few pitifully muffled cries.

Looking around him, Nat saw a large crowd of people, all in a similar state of panic. Running wildly, smashing things and hitting each other, this mob was clearly distressed. A few amongst the mob were wearing 1950s-style letter jackets. The original letters had been torn off, and they had been replaced with single, shining “As”. When prompted, one of the jacket-wearers responded, “My status is on the line! My beautiful status! The one I earned in high school!”

Another gathering had formed around a burning trash can across the street, and approaching this crowd, Nat saw that it was largely comprised of administrators. Dean Julie was in the process of gnawing a human leg, and Richard Shaw had grown a thick coat of stubble. He was rattling a tin cup with a single coin in it, and his clearly shaking hands held a sign that read “will evaluate for food.”

It seemed that wherever Nat went in Stanfordia, there was chaos. Meyer Library was filled with pale, crawling creatures, strands of mucous dangling from their barely closed lips. Students, who appeared to have no idea what to do with themselves, were hanging limply from every conceivable surface, and some were drawing tic-tac-toe squares on the side of Tresidder.

Phones all over campus were ringing off the hook, the cries of angry and anxious parents echoing from the other end of the mouthpiece. “No grades? How will we love you?” screamed one particularly adamant parent.

Over the next few weeks, Nat saw his formerly pristine campus utopia degenerate into pure anarchy. But in the heart of the mire, in the heat of the lootings and the burnings, he saw something beautiful arise. Suddenly, students stopped their raging and their mobbing and started to make art — beautiful, simple art, inspired by a creativity that was born when liberated from evaluation. The students started more engaging, interesting conversations that didn’t center around letters and numbers but around ideas.

And just as Stanfordia truly became a forum for the exchange of ideas, Nat was jolted awake by a splash of cold reality. He sighed, rolled over to face the circled number written above the test on his dresser and started another day of his life.