Tilted by the News

As loyal readers know, I'm in graduate school. One of the responsibilities of most grad students is to work as a teaching assistant for undergraduate classes. So I was pretty tilted when I saw this article in the Times. A choice quote:

"A recent study by researchers at the Unversity of California, Irvine, found 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."

The gist of the article is that students believe that their grades should correspond to their effort (or at least, they believe if they work hard they should get good grades, I didn't see anything about students who don't work hard but do well on tests deserving bad grades) and not the quality of their work. What a terrible lesson to teach young adults about the way the world works. The function of grades are to tell anyone who cares to know, be that an potential employer or the student herself, how well the student understands the material presented in the course. This allows the employer to evaluate how competent this student would be in completing similar tasks in a job, and allows the student to determine whether they need to study more or have any sort of capacity for work in the field. 

This function is vitiated by giving grades for effort and not performance, even putting aside the fact that effort is not observable. It is possible to tilt grades more towards effort, for instance by assigning a lot of busy work homeworks that constitute a large portion of the grade and weighting less towards exams (although note that even this is a far cry from handing out a B to all the students that show up). There is some value in assessing a student's ability to take responsibility for a simple and easy task. I think it's OK to let a failing student get a passing grade by virtue of completing such assignments. Or dropping an A student down to an A- if she can't manage to get them done. But if someone gets a C or a D on all the tests, how can they expect to get a B for the course just because they attended lectures?? Learn the material and get an A on the exams, moron! Or if you spent that much time studying and still couldn't hack it, find a new department!! You aren't entitled to a good grade just because you showed up!

Really this is just one more step in a process of ceding control of universities over to undergraduates. This is a predictable result of universities deriving much of their revenue from undergraduate tuition and fees. The customer is always right. These days, the "customers" are handed course evaluation forms at the end of every class so they can deny tenure to all the professors who have the gall to deny them the B they so richly deserve for showing up to class that day.

-BRUECHIPS