Grade Inflation
As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!
I feel like daytime TV is basically the epitome of sloth. A medium generally reserved for people who, for whatever reason, are sitting around watching TV in the middle of the day rather than working, daytime television caters to their perceived laziness with a parade of advertisements shilling labor saving products. Herbal supplements and miracle diets promise fast weight loss without having to exercise or watch what you eat, online dating sites make it possible to fall in love without leaving your computer, and for everything else in life, there’s ShamWow (as the man says, it’s made in Germany, and you know they always make the best stuff).
We’ve started to shift our responsibilities off of ourselves and onto other people and things in our environment. No longer is it our own fault that we’re fat, it’s because of a hormone deficiency that this pill can fix. The reason we can’t find suitable partners isn’t because we spend all of our time inside playing World of Warcraft, it’s because we haven’t been matched to a member of the opposite sex based on 29 dimensions that apparently determine happiness. The economy isn’t a mess because of our rampant speculation in the housing market, it’s because people haven’t been buying enough ShamWow towels.
This shift in responsibility is especially evident in higher education. An increasing number of college professors say that students will visit them during their office hours attempting to haggle a higher grade on one of their papers, arguing that they tried very, very hard and that the professor was unfair in giving them a C or a B- for what the student thought was a really strong effort. In fact, a recent study from the University of California, Irvine reported that a third of students surveyed expected a B simply for showing up to class on a regular basis. Just in case you’d forgotten, a B is traditionally defined as “above average.” So what this means is that a significant percentage of America’s future leaders and entrepreneurs think that they’re above average simply by virtue of the fact that they know how to show up to a specified location on time with some semblance of regularity. How about that for an ego problem – I’ve been called pompous before, but I’ve never assumed that my professor is going to give me a good grade because I made his or her class that much more awesome by coming in every day and just being me. To be fair, though, we students aren’t the only ones with this problem – President Bush showed up to work just about every day (when he wasn’t on vacation) and still seemed to fancy himself as an above average leader.
I’m mystified by the commonly held notion that professors “give” us our grades. They give us our grades in the sense that they pull out a marker and write a letter on the papers we hand in or calculate a percentage at the end of the term, but they make these decisions based on material that we create and give to them. Professors don’t “give” us grades – they look at our work and evaluate it against their standard of quality, and the grade reflects how close we came to what they were looking for. Sure, it’s tough to know exactly what a professor expects of you – thank God they print that sort of information on the syllabus. Effort does factor into the equation; it always takes effort to make something good. However, it’s also fully possible to expend a decent amount of effort and make something bad. The real trick, I suppose, is to make the effort in your classes to actually learn something, and then incorporate that effort into your essay writing and test taking efforts. Just because you spend a few hours on something doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good – take this column, for instance.
I feel like this problem is rooted in our upbringing, where we were taught that everyone was a winner and that, if we tried hard enough, we could do literally anything. As useful as these ideas may have been to our youthful psyches, they were perpetuated throughout our schooling and they evidently persist today in our world of grade inflation and deferred responsibility. The simple fact is that we can’t all be winners (as evidenced by the University of Washington’s football team) and that trying alone is not the one shot formula for achieving your dreams – if it were, half of the adults in this country would be astronauts, and the other half would be princesses.
If you want to succeed you do have to try, but you also have to learn and compromise. That means actively participating in your classes, not just showing up, and also learning to sacrifice some more of your leisure time to really go the extra mile on your term paper. It means eating right and exercising, not just taking a pill and hoping for the best. It means going out and meeting people, not entering facts about yourself into a web browser. As far as ShamWow is concerned, though, you can just keep on doing what you’re doing.
I feel like daytime TV is basically the epitome of sloth. A medium generally reserved for people who, for whatever reason, are sitting around watching TV in the middle of the day rather than working, daytime television caters to their perceived laziness with a parade of advertisements shilling labor saving products. Herbal supplements and miracle diets promise fast weight loss without having to exercise or watch what you eat, online dating sites make it possible to fall in love without leaving your computer, and for everything else in life, there’s ShamWow (as the man says, it’s made in Germany, and you know they always make the best stuff).
We’ve started to shift our responsibilities off of ourselves and onto other people and things in our environment. No longer is it our own fault that we’re fat, it’s because of a hormone deficiency that this pill can fix. The reason we can’t find suitable partners isn’t because we spend all of our time inside playing World of Warcraft, it’s because we haven’t been matched to a member of the opposite sex based on 29 dimensions that apparently determine happiness. The economy isn’t a mess because of our rampant speculation in the housing market, it’s because people haven’t been buying enough ShamWow towels.
This shift in responsibility is especially evident in higher education. An increasing number of college professors say that students will visit them during their office hours attempting to haggle a higher grade on one of their papers, arguing that they tried very, very hard and that the professor was unfair in giving them a C or a B- for what the student thought was a really strong effort. In fact, a recent study from the University of California, Irvine reported that a third of students surveyed expected a B simply for showing up to class on a regular basis. Just in case you’d forgotten, a B is traditionally defined as “above average.” So what this means is that a significant percentage of America’s future leaders and entrepreneurs think that they’re above average simply by virtue of the fact that they know how to show up to a specified location on time with some semblance of regularity. How about that for an ego problem – I’ve been called pompous before, but I’ve never assumed that my professor is going to give me a good grade because I made his or her class that much more awesome by coming in every day and just being me. To be fair, though, we students aren’t the only ones with this problem – President Bush showed up to work just about every day (when he wasn’t on vacation) and still seemed to fancy himself as an above average leader.
I’m mystified by the commonly held notion that professors “give” us our grades. They give us our grades in the sense that they pull out a marker and write a letter on the papers we hand in or calculate a percentage at the end of the term, but they make these decisions based on material that we create and give to them. Professors don’t “give” us grades – they look at our work and evaluate it against their standard of quality, and the grade reflects how close we came to what they were looking for. Sure, it’s tough to know exactly what a professor expects of you – thank God they print that sort of information on the syllabus. Effort does factor into the equation; it always takes effort to make something good. However, it’s also fully possible to expend a decent amount of effort and make something bad. The real trick, I suppose, is to make the effort in your classes to actually learn something, and then incorporate that effort into your essay writing and test taking efforts. Just because you spend a few hours on something doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good – take this column, for instance.
I feel like this problem is rooted in our upbringing, where we were taught that everyone was a winner and that, if we tried hard enough, we could do literally anything. As useful as these ideas may have been to our youthful psyches, they were perpetuated throughout our schooling and they evidently persist today in our world of grade inflation and deferred responsibility. The simple fact is that we can’t all be winners (as evidenced by the University of Washington’s football team) and that trying alone is not the one shot formula for achieving your dreams – if it were, half of the adults in this country would be astronauts, and the other half would be princesses.
If you want to succeed you do have to try, but you also have to learn and compromise. That means actively participating in your classes, not just showing up, and also learning to sacrifice some more of your leisure time to really go the extra mile on your term paper. It means eating right and exercising, not just taking a pill and hoping for the best. It means going out and meeting people, not entering facts about yourself into a web browser. As far as ShamWow is concerned, though, you can just keep on doing what you’re doing.