February 24, 2009--The "Self-Entitled"

Because of the current economic meltdown, while we are in the process of resetting the value of assets--from real estate to stocks to appropriate corporate salaries and bonuses to Armani suits--there are other things that also need correcting and recalibrating.

Take college grades for example.

For decades concern has been expressed about grade inflation, a kind of academic bubble that has seen average grades for courses swell well beyond what a normal Bell Curve would suggest reflects normal variations in human potential and achievement.

I am old enough to remember when many professors graded us according to that curve, informing us at the beginning of, say, Organic Chemistry, that he would lay out all of our numerical grades on a curve and award those in the top ten percent A’s and those in the bottom 10 percent F’s. The rest, those of us receiving (he said “earning”) B’s and C’s and D’s would be sliced from the swollen center of the Bell Curve.

Unfortunately for me, since I tended to reside for the most part in that average middle, a few years later, under various forms of political, social, and parental pressure, grades began to inflate so that by the end of the 1970s Ivy League college professors and many others were giving so many students As that by graduation time fully 75 percent of graduating seniors were earning Latin Honors. Again, in my day, at my Ivy League college, only about 10 percent of my most-brainy classmates were thus magna or summa cum lauded.

But in spite of calls for professors to ratchet things back at least a bit, grade inflation, like the housing bubble, has continued to expand so that now even at community colleges, where one would think that the pressure from affluent and entitled-feeling students and their parents would not be so palpable, grade inflation is also a problem.

It is a problem because it reinforces that sense of entitlement and unrealistic expectations that then later plays out badly as these students graduate and enter full adulthood, relationships, and the world of work. Being unrealistically evaluated, in truth all the way from kindergarten onward, does not prepare young people very well for the vicissitudes of what they will encounter when they have inevitably to face the “real world’s” hurdles, bumps, and worse.

So it is encouraging to see that the way college grades are awarded is again in the news. The New York Times recently wrote about an awkwardly worded but still well-titled study that says it all, “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors.”

This University of California study found that a third of students said they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent felt they were entitled to a B for just completing the required reading. In effect, that a B should be the default grade. (Article linked below.)

According to the associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality . . . that ‘If I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’”

Confirming this, in the entitlement study, nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed claimed that if they tried hard, when grading them, professors should take that into consideration.

Summing up this attitude, one student asserted, “I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade. What else is there really than the effort you put in?”

I have an answer for that--How about evidence that you’ve actually learned something?

He continued, “If you put in all the effort you have [sic] and get a C, what is the point? If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves.”

And then, my favorite part, he adds, “If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

Indeed there is. And doesn’t this sound very much like what we have been hearing from whiners on Wall Street about why the are entitled to their bonuses, their version of A’s, “I deserve them because I worked hard. Seventy hours a week. Isn’t that worth something?”

Well, yes, it is. But if and only if you and your bank actually made any money, rather than losing billions and then being bailed out at taxpayers’, sorry, my expense.