You're missing one key point that I meant to touch on in the original post: This professor is still living in the bad system you describe. They just pretend it doesn't exist until the very end.

If they were some private school that lived outside of the GPA system, or were apart of some tutoring company, then sure it'd probably work well. But they don't.

So when I say "track progress", I mean track progress in the current system using the main thing I am (or, was) measured on: GPA.