A'S for Everyone!

From the Washington Post courtesy of Eschaton courtesy of DC Media Girl:

"Most of the complaints that colleagues tell me about come from B students," said James Mooney, special assistant to the dean for academic affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences. "They all want to know why they didn't get an A. Is there something wrong with a B?"

And

And the pressure on professors to keep the A's coming isn't unique to AU. It's endemic to college life, according to Stuart Rojstaczer, a Duke University professor who runs a Web site called Gradeinflation.com. At Duke and many other colleges, A's outnumber B's, and C's have all but disappeared from student transcripts, his research shows.

Click here for the rest.

I've recently encountered this phenomenon myself, with a couple of challenges to final grades I've given this past year in the introductory acting class I teach at LSU--both students earned B's, but pestered me about not getting A's. They were nothing like the obsessive kids mentioned in the above linked Washington Post article, but I think it's part of the same trend, a seemingly large sub-population of college and university students viewing good grades as an entitlement. The article discusses some possible causes:

Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University Teacher's College and an authority on grading, traces what's going on to the Vietnam War. "Men who got low grades could be drafted," Levine says. "The next piece was the spread of graduate schools where only A's and B's were passing grades. That soon got passed on to undergraduates and set the standard."

And then there's consumerism, he says. Pure and simple, tuition at a private college runs, on average, nearly $28,000 a year. If parents pay that much, they expect nothing less than A's in return. "Therefore, if the teacher gives you a B, that's not acceptable," says Levine, "because the teacher works for you. I expect A's, and if I'm getting B's, I'm not getting my money's worth."

Some experts, however, and I agree with them, think the whole thing starts in high school:

"Certainly there are students who are victims of grade inflation in secondary school," said Mooney. "They come to college, and the grading system is much more rigorous. That's one of the most difficult things to convey to the students. If you're getting a B, you're doing well in a course."

But I think it's more than students simply being accustomed to good grades. The pressuring exists in high school, too. Indeed, when I was teaching high school, I was also pressured by students and parents from "good families" for whom a B or a C was just not good enough. I know there are a lot of various factors at play, but I can't help but think of something I wrote here a year and a half ago:

I had a very strong sense by the time I was a senior in high school that I was really only mastering a system of behavior: that same year, I got myself blackballed from the National Honor Society by penning an essay about our school's unworthiness to be recognized as one of the best in the nation. The essay was called "The Masters of B. S." I pissed off a lot of teachers with that one; the principal even threatened to give me some extra schoolwork to compensate for my feelings of being ill educated. The essay concentrated on how easy it was to avoid assignments if one knew how to do so. My conclusion was that the main lesson I had learned from school was how to sling bullshit, and that I had not been truly educated.

As I have said many times, the emphasis that public school places on discipline and authority is so strong that true educational goals become secondary, often meaningless. School becomes, then, a system of rewards and punishments for how well students do as they're told. Grading is no exception: it is more important that students do assignments than do well on them--typically, the effort alone is enough to get an A. Indeed, especially in humanities-oriented high school courses, it is better that students don't do well on assignments, because doing well usually means showing some kind of critical or independent thought, which runs counter to the authority and discipline mandate. Overall, learning, as a concept, suffers.

Children from families who have high expectations have, over the years, learned how to game the system. It is instinctively understood, by parents too, how meaningless learning is at the secondary level, and that even bright students typically perform well below their capabilities. Why try? Getting an A is easy enough; just turn in any old piece of crap, and, as long as it's in the proper format, it's going to score well. However, this laziness sometimes results in a lower grade, and that's when the gaming begins. First students nag teachers, then go over their heads to principals. If this fails, parents get involved, pestering teachers over the phone, and like their children, going over the teachers' heads to their superiors. Arguments often have nothing to do with how well a student actually performed, often focusing on weird technicalities like specific dates of student absence or whether a progress report was sent. Careful record-keeping becomes extraordinarily important for teachers, which takes time away from instructional planning, watering down education all the more.

Clearly, because they are academically irrelevant, good grades have become for some families an entitlement, and because these are the families most likely to send their children to college, such attitudes become prevalent there. Complicating this problem even further is the notion that a college degree is all about getting a piece of paper that will improve job prospects, instead of getting a good education that will improve the self. Learning itself becomes further devalued while the grades, because they are perceived as important on a resume, become overly emphasized.

It seems pretty clear to me. The meaninglessness of learning at the secondary level is affecting how education works at the college level. When I was an undergraduate in the 80s and early 90s, I remember professors complaining about how incoming freshmen no longer seemed to have good writing skills. They don't complain anymore: most freshmen now simply take remedial writing courses; problem solved. Student attitudes about learning and grades, it seems, are not so easily solved, however. I expect more complaints from my solid B students in the future.

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