Decades ago, college students who didn’t learn much of the material might have been fortunate enough to get the “gentleman’s C” and if they did, they heaved a sigh of relief. It used to be the case that students mostly got what they had earned based on their performance. Grades, most people assumed, were supposed to reflect how well each student learned the subject.
These days, a different view prevails among students—that they’re entitled to a “good grade” (which means nothing less than a B) simply for trying.
An article in the New York Times last week explored student attitudes and it confirmed something professors have been saying for years. Many students come into college with the idea that grades should be based simply on effort, not on achievement. The author quotes a University of Maryland student majoring in kinesiology: “I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade. What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”
Well, how about results?
The Times article was prompted by a study done by researchers at the University of California-Irvine, “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting and Motivational Factors” published in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence. (It’s not available online, unfortunately.) The lead researcher, Professor Ellen Greenberger, had sensed this entitlement mentality among many of her students and wanted to investigate it.
First of all, she found it to be widespread. One third of the students surveyed said that they should receive a B just for having attended all the lectures; 40 percent said they were entitled to a B if they did all the required readings.
Show up for class and do the readings and you’re entitled to a B. If you actually learn something, then apparently you get an A. These students don’t set the bar very high for themselves.
Professor Greenberger wanted to find out why today’s college students have the belief that they are owed good grades just for having gone through the educational motions. She concluded that it could be due to increasing pressure from parents, increasing competition among students, and growing “achievement anxiety.”
I do not see how it’s possible to say that those pressures are rising. They have always been with us. As someone who went to high school in the 1960s, I recall that the pressure on students to succeed was intense back then. More importantly, why should pressures of that kind lead students to adopt the illogical notion that mere effort is good enough to warrant the badge of success? If their K-12 teachers consistently graded them on academic performance, how would the grade entitlement idea get started?
That brings me to the “self-esteem” mantra that’s so popular among “progressive” education theorists. If a large number of teachers are caught up in the Lake Woebegone Syndrome, telling students that they’re all above average and ardently opposed to putting any of them through the supposed trauma of a C, a D, or horror of horrors, an F, that would account for entitlement mentality. It’s hard to see how this “I tried so I’m entitled to a good grade” notion could be so pervasive if teachers weren’t propagating it.
What happens when students with these ideas about grading enter college? You would hope that professors would quickly disabuse them of the belief that mere effort is enough to earn at least a B. You might think they’d say, “I have no way of knowing how hard you try but effort doesn’t matter; results do.” If you hope that, too bad. To a great extent, college administrators and professors cave in when confronted by this “I’m entitled to a good grade just because I tried” mindset.
Last year, I wrote about a blatant case at Norfolk State University, where a professor was terminated because he insisted on giving students the grades they actually earned, not the ones they felt they deserved. Keeping students happy, even if it means falsely inflating their egos with unwarranted praise and grades, has become an overriding concern on many American campuses.
Among others who have noted that is saxophone great and music professor Branford Marsalis, whose observations I noted here.
Administrators like happy students because they’re apt to stay enrolled (thus helping school finances) and because high dropout statistics make the school look bad. Professors like happy students because they are more apt to write good evaluations and because they are unlikely to cause trouble about their grades. As Murray Sperber observed in his book Beer and Circus (which I reviewed here), “If a professor actually flunks a student, or allows a TA to do so, that faculty member must have documentation to justify the F, not only that student’s papers and exams throughout the course—all carefully marked with each grade fully explained—but, for comparison, samples of the work of other students who earned similar and higher grades.”
Giving low grades leads to more work and the prospect of time-consuming procedures if a grade is challenged. It’s easier to give every student at least a “safe” grade. That used to be a C, but now even C grades can elicit protests.
Student entitlement feelings; administrators who want to keep revenues flowing in; professors who take the path of least resistance—all contribute to the phenomenon of grade inflation. Former Duke University professor Stu Rojstaczer, who has been studying grade inflation for years, says that we’re rapidly approaching the point where A will be average.
Who is responsible for arresting this trend? University of Pittsburgh professor Lee Gutkind hit the nail right on the head when he recently wrote, “Educators must lead the way to take responsibility for the morals and ethics of students by taking a deep look inside themselves and their own actions, drawing their moral and ethical boundaries and honoring the mission with which they have been entrusted. It begins with honesty in grading—rewarding excellence and valuing achievement.”
Sooner or later, everyone has to confront the reality that merely having tried isn’t good enough. The world outside the educational cocoon rewards people based on achievement. Teachers from grade school through college do students a disservice if they persist in encouraging the fanciful notion that they are entitled to success.