College isn't grade school....

....you don't get an A for effort.

This New York Times article couldn't have been written at a better time. I was just talking with a fellow adjunct professor about the entitlement, lack of ownership, and sheer laziness college students have these days. I don't know if it's my age (I graduated college in 2000) or my upbringing, but these kids seem to think that professors OWE them good grades just for putting in the minimum amount of effort.

In my book, a minimum amount of effort is a C. Anyone can get a C if they show up to class and pay attention more than half the time. Half of my current class blatantly didn't follow instructions on an assignment and I still gave them a C-. I should have failed them but I didn't have the heart.

Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.” - From The New York Times

I earned every single A i got in college and grad school by hard work and going above and beyond what was expected of me. College kids seem to think they start a class with an A and work their way down when, really, they need to work their way up.

I teach an undergraduate journalism class and frequently have my students write stories on deadline, which is by the end of class. I know this is stressful -- I went through the same thing in college -- but it's practice. It's the real world. One of my students complained that my comment of "blah" on a particularly cliche sentence hurt her feelings. If I had shown her some of the comments my professors and editors had given me maybe she would have felt lucky to have only gotten a "blah."

College students these days are being sent out into the world with no clue as to what it holds for them. They believe that putting in a lot of effort merits a good grade. And while I take hard work and progress into account, it doesn't matter if they work all semester on a story about the effect the economy has on small area businesses if I asked them to cover a local high school basketball game.

I love teaching on the college level, but I'm frequently frustrated. This article gave me some interesting insight into a group of people I'm trying hard to understand.