A's for Everyone!

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.”

It’s a concept that many students (and their parents) have a hard time grasping. Working hard, especially the night before a test or a paper due date, does not necessarily produce good grades.

“At the age of 50, if I work extremely hard, I can run a mile in eight minutes,” says Watson. “I have students who can jog through a mile in seven minutes and barely sweat. They will always finish before me and that’s not fair. Or is it?” —Alicia C. ShepardA’s for Everyone! (Washington Post (will expire))

6 thoughts on “A's for Everyone!

  1. The 8-minute (or 12-minute…) mile analogy seemed apt at first, but I wonder if setting handicaps for our students golf games isn’t closer to what happens in freshman composition classes (mine, at least, esp. at a community college)?

  2. Long ago, my sixth grade teacher told us on the first day of class, “I never give out A’s. The highest anyone will get in my class in an A-. Because no one is perfect.” And she never did give out any A’s.

  3. This was funny – “Sure, on the job, end results are all that matters”. No really, hilarious. As someone who is actually working at a full time job for the last year, I can tell you – it’s just as weird and semi-sensicle as classes, just in different ways. It seems that end results don’t matter as much, because by the time you actually get feedback on what you did months or years have gone by.

    Those people who are really good at looking like they’re really putting in the effort are actually developing a more valuable skill than I ever imagined…

  4. Students who put in “effort” by doing such things as submitting rough drafts early, visiting office hours, or going to the writing center don’t need to have their grades artificially raised, because those kinds of effort just naturally lead to better work.

    A C+ student who succeeds in producing an A+ paper already gets a reward — the A+. If that student puts in effort toward an A+, but manages only a B, then the B is a fair and just reward.

    Turn it around… what about the case of an A student who only puts in enough effort for a B on a particular paper. Should that student get a C+ as punishment?

    There’s no such thing as an “effort-o-meter” that professors can use to evaluate a student’s claim to have put in extra effort.

    In the world of physics, you can expend “effort” by pushing with all your might against an object, but you are only doing “work” if you manage to get that object to move. It takes a certain amount of energy to remain vertical against the pull of gravity, but that doesn’t count if you’re measuring jumping or climbing.

    Universities recognize that students with special learning needs don’t come into the classroom on a level playing field, so accommodations such as note-takers, tutors, or extra time for exams can help out. Depending on the class, I may let a non-native English speaker bring a dictionary. But it’s not generally considered the professor’s responsibility to make those kind of adjustments. We’re not trained to make those kinds of judgements on our own, so I don’t even try.

    Sometimes students who come to me asking for extra considerations say they don’t want to get the university administration involved, but I tell them that they’re already asking the university to get involved if they’re asking me to accommodate their special needs. One student who was very bright in class but performed miserably on exams was in tears at my refusal to simply wave a magic wand and make the grades go higher. I told her that, while I’m not an expert, I thought that perhaps she was mildly dyslexic, and she had chosen an artistic/visual specialty in order to compensate… and that she was probably so good at compensating that she had convinced herself she didn’t need help. After the class was over, she e-mailed me to say that she had gone to see a specialist, was diagnosed as dyslexic, and was amazed at how her perception of the world around her had changed, now that she was getting help from specialists who knew how to help her train her mind to adjust for her special needs. If I had simply given her an A, she would never have been motivated to get help, and her world would still be very confusing and frustrating outside of the small realm where her coping strategies helped her to function.

    Having said that, I do actually have a “class participation” slot in my gradebook, where I will reward what seems to me to be overall, semester-long effort, and typically I use it when turning the student’s numerical final score into the letter grade I have to assign. But that only comes into play after all the work has been evaluated.

  5. classes are not jobs, per se, and the more we (meaning everyone, not just teachers) assume it should work the same way, the less we’re teaching the liberal arts and the more we’re teaching trade school.

    That point is a very good Dr. A.

    But shouldn’t matter that a student, who is normally a C+ student put an effort into make the paper an A+ paper matter for something though?

    I’m not saying give him or her an A+ or anything, but shouldn’t something like that be taken into consideration?

  6. I like that final analogy. I’ve told students something similar: that the worker who commutes ten miles to work in a fancy limo and the worker who walks all way in the snow would still both get paid the same amount for the same job.

    But, of course, this only pertains to “summative assessment” (grading the end product as if that was all that mattered), rather than “formative assessment” (grading the process…which we ostensibly do with portfolios in a writing class). Sure, on the job, end results are all that matters, but classes are not jobs, per se, and the more we (meaning everyone, not just teachers) assume it should work the same way, the less we’re teaching the liberal arts and the more we’re teaching trade school.

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