Following on my last post about Good News on Teaching, a bit of bad news: Tuesday’s New York Times included an article (now one of the “most emailed”) about the impact of current students’ sense of entitlement on their professors’ ability to give them honest grades pegged to something more than basic compliance with course norms. Among the most depressing findings is the discovery that “a third of students [in a recent University of California Irvine study] said that they expected B‚Äôs just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.” The problem is neatly summed up by one of the students quoted in the article:
Indeed, something is wrong, though not in the way that the student means it. While I’m all for rewarding effort, and I try to recognize improvement as well as raw performance in my grading, ultimately grades are meant to account for something more complex than enthusiastic compliance with course expectations. They should reflect a student’s mastery of material; those who have learned both the skills and the content that the instructor attempts to impart should earn higher marks than the students who have not. Learning is not simply about following a recipe, completing tasks, or ticking boxes; it’s about reflection, struggle, false starts, and‚Äîeventually, hopefully‚Äîmastery. Merely “doing” the reading isn’t the same as processing it.
Perhaps the most alarming thing about this article, however, is not its documentation of students’ increasing sense of entitlement or decreasing sympathy with the goals of education. Anyone on the front lines of college teaching must surely have noticed that already. What bothers me more is the fact that faculty seem so happy to go along with it. How else can we explain the fact that A’s and A‚Äì’s make up fully half of Harvard grades? It’s been suggested that the answer may lie in the steadily-increasing quality of our student body. The more harrowing the admissions statistics, the better the quality of student work, one supposes. That may in fact be true‚Äîperhaps our current students are better at completing the kinds of assignments we tend to give them‚Äîbut isn’t it a failure of higher education if we respond to that trend by simply giving all of our students A’s?