Grades

I should be working on the presentation I have to give in less than 3 hours, but while eating my cereal and glancing through the NYtimes I saw this:


Battling grade inflation and student expectations is an ongoing battle for those of us in the actual trenches. In my 4 years as a TA, I've had students tear up when they look at their mediocre paper and see I had the audacity to mark them with a B or a B-, instead of the A they expected. A recent NYTimes article addressed the connection, in the minds of most students, between when they perceive as hard work and the grade they feel they deserve. One of the students interviewed said that if he attended every lecture, read every book and did exactly what the professor assigned and even more, he expected to get an A. Well, he's right. The problem is that studetns read 40-60% of the work, attend 75% of the lectures, 70-80% of the sections, write average to good papers, and then expect to get As.

The short version is that there is a firm belief in the A for effort, and a lack of understanding of 1) what hard work is (yes, those 4 hours you spent trying to write a 6 page paper may have been stressful and difficult, but that does not equal hours of actual hard work, research, and editing), 2) you can work very very hard at something and still not receive an A or even an A-. I can work very hard to run a marathon, but if I only get to mile 16, I didn't actually run a marathon.

Anyway, back to presentation, but I couldn't pass this one up.