Students, Grades, and the Question of "Entitlement"

Forums: Teaching, Degradation Of Education, Educational Standards, Decline In Education, Everything Old Is New Again
Email this Topic • Print this Page

An interesting article from the New York Times about what some call a growing sense of entitlement among students: Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes. Some excerpts:

Quote:

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

Quote:

James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’"

Quote:

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

My own experiences are pretty close to the observations made here. I once had a student complain about an A- (!) because she felt she did everything the assignments required to do. I told her that she did only what the assignments required her to do, and that I reserve A's for students who go above and beyond what the assignments require. She was unhappy with that policy. She seemed to treat the assignment like a business transaction: "I paid this much, I should get a working product," with "working product" evidently defined as an A.

Topic Stats
Top Replies
Link to this Topic

Type: Discussion • Score: 3 • Views: 2,304 • Replies: 6

No top replies

@Shapeless,

It's the inevitable outcome of the pressure we put on students to make A's. As college becomes more and more important, 'c' is no longer acceptable, because being average is no longer enough - even though college is quickly becoming an average thing to do. Kids are in a bind over it.

That's why I said **** it a long time ago and decided to go to school to learn, and to the devil with the grades... worked out well enough for me.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

Quote:

As college becomes more and more important, 'c' is no longer acceptable, because being average is no longer enough - even though college is quickly becoming an average thing to do. Kids are in a bind over it.

It's a good point. I once had a conversation with a student in which I reminded her that there was a time when a C meant "average," quite different from today's perception of a C as basically a D with a prettier dress on. The student said she understood teachers' frustrations with grade inflation and applauded individual teachers' attempts to fight it, but in the meantime it was hurting her chances of getting into med school. She had a point. Teachers can fight the good fight, but while they do so their students lose out to the ones whose teachers don't.

0 Replies

Articles like this use words like "entitlement" as a underhanded insult to my generation which is being asked to do and learn things in college that Phds were doing when they matriculated.

Nevermind that in the time it took for the cost of living to double, the cost of college multiplied by 7.

I'm going to count the seconds before somebody runs in here with a worn out whippersnapper rant about my generation.

T
K
O

1 Reply

@Diest TKO,

I wonder if it is possible to have it both ways? Can we acknowledge that the bar is higher now for an undergraduate while still maintaining that students have to do more than attend class in order to get an A? Or does the former make the latter unreasonable?

0 Replies

Quote:

I told her that she did only what the assignments required her to do, and that I reserve A's for students who go above and beyond what the assignments require

.

Okay. I confess - I don't get this.

If she just did everything required by the assignments, why wasn't her grade a C?

Isn't completeing the assignments what the average student would be expected to do?

Does simply showing up = C?

I'm not trying to be dense but I don't get it.

1 Reply

@boomerang,

Quote:

Isn't completeing the assignments what the average student would be expected to do?

Well, that's precisely the issue. There was a time when fulfilling the bare minimum requirements of an assignment would have been a C. But these days, not so much. Most teachers and professors I know have pushed that bare minimum up to at least a B.

In any event, I should have specified that this particular student completed the assignments, but completed them well. The general grading scale I use looks something like this: for students who complete the bare minimum requirements of the assignment (i.e. there is a question and they give very basic, 2- or 3- sentence answers), C to low B range. For students who complete the requirements of the assignment and who venture some original thought in a rough but functionally sound way (i.e. the answers are more substantive but still stay comfortably within the scope of the questions), B to low A range. For students who complete the requirements of the assignment and who incorporate original thoughts in a well-executed argument that goes beyond what the question required, A range.

0 Replies

Students, Grades, and the Question of "Entitlement"

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know