This essay explores the use of contract grading as a means to combat the commodification of education. Starting with an examination of traditional grading practices, the author moves on to explore contract grading as an alternative to the free-market, capitalistic approach to higher education in the United States and its apparent ultimate goal of maintaining/exacerbating the nation's class boundaries and current unequal distribution of wealth and power. The author's use of contract grading as a vehicle for the exploration of the systemic forces at play in United States higher education symbolizes the implied thesis of the essay--the primacy of traditional grading as the sole means to evaluate student learning is evidence of majoritarian America's almost pathological quest to maintain the unequal and inequitable distribution of and access to wealth and influence within American society by reducing educational attainment to a mere means of production, the relative value of which is maintained by limiting the supply of educated individuals; thus, contract grading is itself a means to a very different sort of end: the fair and equitable recomposition of American society.