Do grades make us better climbers, or quietly worse?
The few times the setters at my gym leave a new set ungraded for a week, I love it. You climb things because they look good and throw yourself at whatever catches your eye, with no number telling you what you're supposed to manage. It got me wondering what grades are actually for, and whether they help us improve or push us the wrong way.
Think about the most efficient grade-chasing strategy. If the goal is to climb a number, the smart move is to find the softest problem that suits your style and send that. Completely rational, and a great way to get better at what you're already good at and nothing else. It works in reverse too. Once a grade is tied to how you see yourself, falling on something below it stings, so you start avoiding the styles you're weak at. The number meant to track your progress ends up steering you toward your strengths and away from the climbs that would round you out.
A lot of this comes from a grade being a consensus average, and an average fits no one in particular. The same V5 is a flash for one person and a multi-session war for another, depending on what each is good at. Most of us aren't standing in the middle, so the one number can't tell us what we actually want to know: not how hard this is on average, but how hard it is for you.
One fix is to make difficulty a rating instead of a fixed grade. Chess style, where a rating predicts your odds of beating an opponent at a given rating, except here the opponent is the climb and the numbers come from who sends what instead of a consensus vote. That part isn't new; people have built Elo-style experiments before. But a single rating still rewards the same grade-chasing, because it's still one number.
What I picture instead: every climb gets a difficulty rating plus a read on what kind of climb it is, scored on a few style axes (crimp vs sloper, static vs dynamic, steep and powerful vs vertical and technical). You get the same profile out of your own logbook. Put them together and instead of a bare "V5" you see your own odds on a problem, say 40 percent, and which axis is holding you back.
That's the part I'd actually use. Your weak axis is right there, so you can go find problems at the edge of your ability in exactly that style, the ones where you fail productively, and watch the profile shift as you log attempts. Battling something "below your grade" stops being an ego hit and becomes the obvious move, because the number agrees it's hard for you.
So, genuinely: have grades helped you improve, or steered you toward your strengths and away from your weaknesses? And would a personal, style-aware number change how you train, or is that just a grade with extra steps?
Obvious objections, add more:
\- People don't log fails. If only sends get recorded, the difficulty signal gets shaky. Probably the central problem.
\- Grades are a shared language. "V8" means something instantly to anyone you talk to; a number only meaningful relative to you loses that.
\- It only works where different groups of climbers overlap on the same problems. Where that's thin, the numbers only calibrate inside the bubble.