We often like to ponder the silly things that would come to pass if children ruled the world, but I swear by the many gods in Valhalla, the thought of students in charge of academia sends chills down my spine. No one group or demographic feels such an absurd sense of entitlement to anything as do students when it comes to their grades. It's as if we think the university system exists solely to shower us with 'A's.
My lamentations are far from unfounded; a recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, revealed that "a third of students surveyed said that they expected 'B's just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a 'B' for completing the required reading." Apparently, many think just doing the required work entitles us to a good grade -- the quality of our papers and exam scores is irrelevant, and the only standard we set for ourselves is the bare minimum. By this argument, the grade we receive doesn't represent how well we did in a class, but rather how hard we tried in it. When potential employers are examining our GPAs, then, they should really be looking for how many hours we put into our studies, not the standard of the work we completed.
Allow me to provide an example I feel exemplifies my point. Pretend you are the chief executive officer of a corporation or bank that our government is about to bail out. Over the past couple of years, revenues have been declining, and your company has made some bad investments. You try to remedy the situation by doing whatever it is that big, important CEOs do, but you just cannot seem to make the problems go away. You may have tried your hardest, but does that mean you deserve a fat bonus at the end of the year?
The worldview that we should be rewarded for a high amount effort is the product of two seperate symptons. I agree with Professor Marshall Grossman of the University of Maryland (who was interviewed in a New York Times article about the survey) that "[students] see the default grade as an A." We have become accustomed to getting A's in high school, and some of us are unwilling to loosen our misguided standards for success in college. Many students apparently feel that they should be just as proficient in physics now as they were in high school. Sadly, when we make the transition to college, things have an unpleasant habit of becoming much more difficult. The time for grandiose survey classes about American history has passed, and we are faced with courses that have narrow scopes and detailed syllabi. Being successful in our classes may take more effort than it used to, but this extra exertion alone should not guarantee of a good grade. Otherwise, what's to distinguish those with time from those with talent?
The study also demonstrates our unseemly tendency to project blame when it comes to subpar grades. Even if you (probably wrongly) think that you're above such whining, we have all heard the excuses from friends about why they haven't been performing up to standards: "The prof graded really harshly," and "the material was just so boring!" are among my personal favorites. What none of us likes to bring up, however, is that unless the class we are complaining about was a true train-wreck, someone in it earned an 'A.' Regardless of who put forth the greatest effort, the student whose output was superior should receive the better grade, because that's the standard by which we will be judged when we are launched into the cruel, real world.
This does raise the interesting question of whether professors know how to grade consistently. Naturally, some professors are going to be less forgiving on essays and exam questions than others, but is it fair that certain students have to pass through these hellish experiences while others can skate by taking classes with no finals and midterms with multiple choice questions? Actually, yes. Under the current grading curves most professors use, our grades are scaled to have reasonable medians and even distributions (if done properly). Therefore, it doesn't matter how hard the professor is, we're only competing with our peers for the 'A's.
We sometimes lose sight of a quintessential fact while pursuing our dreams in this academic wonderland: the only thing anyone else sees of our work is the finished product. The brutality of real world capitalism is out there just waiting for us to graduate, and our employers aren't going to care how hard we worked to get that report in. If you can't meet expectations, your boss is going to find someone who will. Isn't the world such a delightfully bleak place?
