Grades vs Education

[TheBeardedDude]

I teach lab courses at a University (my second university as a Teaching Assistant) and I have a friend at the same university who teaches introductory English/writing courses and this is a topic he and I have had many a good rant on, because students clearly value grades over the education that the grades are supposed to reflect.

An example is the flood of students that any given instructor will get at the end of the semester asking one of 3 things:
1) Is there any extra credit I can do?
2) I thought my grade was higher than that, are you sure you recorded this correctly?
3) I really want an A (or B+ or whatever), I worked really hard and think I deserve it.

The answers to these questions are:
1) You should worry less about "extra" credit and do more to get the regular credit. Don't ask for extra.

2) If a grade was recorded incorrectly, that is a legitimate concern but often the mistake is nonexistent or is one where a grade was incorrectly entered but has no net effect on the course grade because the change was minimal.

3) The grade you get is the grade you earned (unless the instructor grades as forgiving as I do, then your grade is actually already inflated), don't ask for a better grade. I am not here to pad your GPA, I am here to help you learn. That is the important bit here, HELP YOU LEARN.


What do you people think? Is there too much emphasis on grades in the education system? (this may primarily apply to the US)

[MindForgedManacle]

I think there is much too much emphasis on grades in the US, and not enough emphasis on really developing the necessary skills. Endless testing in from beginning to end just causes people to train for the test, and not necessarily understand what they're supposed to be learning.

[TheBeardedDude]

Testing in some form is necessary as a way of giving students a chance to display what they have and have not learned. There are a lot of students who do not participate in class or engage in class discussions because they are not comfortable doing so, but then display coherent knowledge on tests.

The question is how do you structure tests appropriately and fairly in the average college class? Where we are talking about (in just the labs I teach) 20+ students per lab and I have 2 sections, so I am typically pushing 45 students or so whereas the lecture will have 300+. Clearly oral exams for 300+ students isn't feasible, nor would essay tests. You would spend the whole bloody semester giving and grading them.

[Minimalist]

No, but there is too much emphasis on testing.

[pocaracas]

For lab work, we have reports on the work that was done.
Sometimes, you have to give the report on the class next week...
Sometimes, the class is particularly long on purpose so you can write the report while in class and give it at the end.

[TheBeardedDude]

I should elaborate on the actions of some of the students I and my friends have had over the last few years to give a little more perspective. I have literally had students email me (as have my colleagues) asking for a better grade just because they felt they deserved it. Not earned it mind you. I have had students ask why they got such a low grade on an assignment/test/quiz. When the reason is plainly obvious, they did not know the material. But that doesn't stand in the way of wanting a better grade. The sad part is that while I would love to say these are the minority of students, I sincerely believe that at least 25% of my class falls into this category.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

I (have) lectured to MA's and Undergraduates before at a UK University so I'll throw in my 2 cents.

Main issue with some undergrads I've found is their expectancy, or rather, their belief that they deserve a good grade for just turning up. Some of the stuff I've taught in basic political science 101 (constructing a good research methodology, basic epistemology or ontology, political systems in liberal democracies and so on) are stuff that I was taught at school (around 8 years ago now :'(), so naturally when taking elements of constructing the course I put these on as good pre-cursors for building onto the juicy, perhaps more complex stuff.

Some of the students didn't get it, which was fine, because I knew that not everyone would have covered some of this stuff before, especially if they hadn't studied politics or political science academically at school. But they still turned up with a sense of entitlement, like everything they needed to know was what I taught them and that was the end of the road as far as advancing their knowledge was concerned.

When I set the exam at the end of the year I purposefully ensured that there would be more stuff on there than they had been taught in lectures, precisely because that's the point of university (or at least it was when I was an undergraduate). You get a basis of knowledge from the lecture which you build upon through your own work and study. I wasn't going to hand it out on a plate and let them get a 2:1 or a 1st just for turning up and writing some notes from my lecture slides.

MY fiancé is a microbiologist who works in a lab. She has the same issue with undergrads turning up just expecting to get a good grade for doing shitty, shoddy research work. Most of them turn up in their 3rd year not even knowing how to use a pipette! Now that's not entirely their fault because the system has obviously failed them in giving them a grounding in lab science methodologies, but still, you'd expect students doing microbiology at University to at least have some sort of expectation/want/affinity for lab work.

So in quick conclusion I would say that yes, a lot of students that I come across to today are more concerned about their grades than what they learn. I can't blame them entirely for this. After all, they're a product of the education system they are brought up in, and if they're brought up to favour grades over everything else, then grades are what they will aim for.

[pocaracas]

Lol... kids these days think they deserve everything...
I blame child psychology of the 80's and 90's.... -.-'
Never before had so much bullshit about raising kids been taken as the right thing to do than in those decades...

I'd like to have a chopper to ride to work and back home every day... I think I deserve it...

[Fidel_Castronaut]

I should elaborate on the actions of some of the students I and my friends have had over the last few years to give a little more perspective. I have literally had students email me (as have my colleagues) asking for a better grade just because they felt they deserved it. Not earned it mind you. I have had students ask why they got such a low grade on an assignment/test/quiz. When the reason is plainly obvious, they did not know the material. But that doesn't stand in the way of wanting a better grade. The sad part is that while I would love to say these are the minority of students, I sincerely believe that at least 25% of my class falls into this category.

I had this a couple of times too. One of my friends is a dean in a medical school looking after Pharmacy students. Man oh man, the stories he tells me about people complaining about his junior lecturers who have given them a poor grade. He's looked at some of their papers and wondered why they even got a grade at all.

[TheBeardedDude]

I don't think the entitlement of the students is directly a reflection of child-rearing in the last few decades. There has been a pretty significant cultural shift over the last century. Who were the most famous people of the centuries prior? They were the novelists and scientists and intellectuals. It was expected that you would value your character above all other things. Since the early 1900's however, we seem to have shifted towards a culture of personality and public perception of our personality instead of character (this is not my own thesis, for that I would point you towards a book by Susan Cain called "Quiet").