reesesWeb

I've been avoiding a California-Bar-studying juggernaut in the living room this weekend, so I've been catching up on my reading, my web surfing, and other projects. Today I was reading a random blog and saw a quote from this article about students upset by getting lower grades than they feel they deserve.

I was pretty much in agreement with the article, and have always believed that people got the grades they more or less deserved based on the work they put into their coursework. I proudly earned all of my mediocre grades in high school and college. In fact, part of me is secretly quite pleased with myself at having gotten credit (by a comfortable 0.5 grade point margin!) for honors chem, attending class only for one midterm and the final, and doing absolutely no homework. Of course, that was pretty much the end of the honors program at university, but who needs that stress anyway?

What galled me and motivated me to post is this paragraph from page two.

John Watson, who teaches journalism ethics and communications law at American, has noticed another phenomenon: Many students, he says, believe that simply working hard -- though not necessarily doing excellent work -- entitles them to an A. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard a student dispute a grade, not on the basis of in-class performance," says Watson, "but on the basis of how hard they tried. I appreciate the effort, and it always produces positive results, but not always the exact results the student wants. We all have different levels of talent."

John Watson, you are an incompetent douchebag.

For a teacher to declare that grades are based on talent is to abdicate any responsibility for students learning anything in the course. Elementary school teachers don't get away with this, why should college professors? I concede that it's definitely the case in law school (which is so competitive that someone has to get the Bs and Cs, even when everyone is working their butts off), but not for a course as regurgatory as journalism ethics.

I had a professor for diffeq who seemed to have much the same attitude. I remember our first quiz, where the top score was unsatisfactorily low, with my particular grade supported only by the fact that I spelled both my name and the professor's name correctly in the upper-right-corner of my paper.

After grading the results, the prof (who looked exactly like a Romulan, although you can't tell it from this picture) tore into our class for not paying attention or doing the necessary work to learn the material. Mind you, I was definitely the underachiever in this course, throwing myself on the C-minus grenade to save my mates; not everyone else was such a slacker -- in fact, no one else was anywhere near, which is why it was the last math course I took.

I'm not really sure why a prof in that situation doesn't feel like a failure, except perhaps that they are guilty of the exact sin of which they accuse the students -- they feel they don't deserve punishment for doing substandard work. "Why did this person not learn the material, even though they worked hard? It can't be my fault! I stood up at the front of the class every day and read from the book!"

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