Whiny Students and Unrealistic Grade Expectations

Well, there's this, according to which student expectations about grades are, well, laughable.

One of the more irritating things about being a professor is that you have to put up with a fair amount of whining, hostility and petulance about grades. You don't have to teach undergraduates very long before it dawns on you that at least a large minority of students expect good grades for mediocre work, and at least a 'C' for deigning to show up to class at all. When they find out that that's not on in my classes, they are shocked, baffled, and angry.

In a way, I have to say, I don't blame them.

Part of it's their fault, of course--many of them are spoiled, ridiculous people who have no business at a university. But a fair bit of the problem is the fault of parents, high school teachers and their other college profs. Students are, in general, not pulling their expectations out of thin air. Many of them have--or so they themselves tell me--grown up getting, e.g., awards for just showing up, and decent grades no matter what they do. They've been taught that 'A' is the default grade, and that if they really screw up, they might be given a 'B' as punishment...but that's about as far as it goes. In college, they've learned that they can drink too much, study too little, and still get respectable grades. It's the system they know. If you buck it, then you, my friend are the anomaly.

Now, there's a certain kind of professor who gets off on being mean. But we're not talking about those *ssholes here. We're talking about profs who have something vaguely like reasonable grading standards--standards according to which 'A' means something vaguely like excellent, 'B' means something vaguely like good, etc. There's a lot of territory between being a villain and being the candy man. These professors, the sensible ones between the extremes, very often feel under siege in today's university. An enraged parent called the Chair of my department an "asshole" last year because he--the Chair--gave the parent's kid an 'F' on a paper. The student had turned in a bad, partially-completed paper. When the Chair explained this to the parent, said parent cited all the money s/he was paying to the school, suggesting that the expectation was: good money for good grades. This is but one story among many.

Among the many bad consequences of the current system is that, as one of my colleagues put it, we have no grade to indicate genuine excellence. The student who does great work is lumped together with the student who does mediocre work, both receiving 'A's in many classes.

A more important consequence is: many students simply aren't really learning very much in college because we aren't making them do so. Most students--even many of the good ones--can be expected to do just enough in most classes to get the grade they think they need. They tacitly rely on us to tell them how much and what kind of work is sufficient to warrant that grade. Professors who have inflated grades are failing their students (and the rest of us) by misleading them about that. Professors set up the incentive structure, and very many of them are blowing it.

We're all of us being failed by this system because universities are turning out extraordinary numbers of essentially uneducated students. Many who graduate with honors should merely graduate, and many who graduate shouldn't. Granted, many of these people go on to take up fairly unimportant jobs where they can do little harm...but one certainly hopes that law schools, medical schools and graduate schools aren't subject to the same kinds of grading problems.