NYTimes.com: "“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."
3 comments:
Wow, the students at Irvine just need to suck it up. I'm kinda embarrassed for being born there now. This makes for the second article that I've read about them bitching about deserving a grade for effort. I have never actually received a grade for effort, just told that I got one: " But you get an a for effort..." It's just an expression, because if they haven't noticed, there is not an "effort" category in the balance of their overall grade.
I find this amusing, after reading the article on this subject posted later on the blog first. This is the same newpaper, with the same quotes. It makes me wonder why this dispute now. Has something radical happened about grades? While i do sometimes wish i went to college when my mom did, where grades all went pass/fail, so there wasn't the petty disputions, i haven't seen a big trend now more than other times about disputes.
What they are saying makes sense though. When people hear that you make a C, they see it as a failure. Never in my life have I heard of anyone defining a B as a good grade. In my high school, if you wanted to be in the top half of the class, you didn't just get all A's. If you had all A's, you could still end up in the bottom half. It was a question of how many AP classes you could take. A's were the norm. B was a screw up. C was a failure.
We were raised in an academic culture where we were told "If you don't get all A's, you won't go to college, and will never be a success in your life." And most high schoolers are raised this way. So then when we come to college and a professor follows a bell curve, its incredibly upsetting. The average student is constantly working their hardest to get a C, a grade they see as a failure. It's a strange system to us.
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