College Students Need To Tough Up Quit Their Grade Whining Summary

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What are the relationships between grading system, effectiveness of instructors, student expectations and their learning? Are grades granted by the same standards across faculties?
In Robert Schlesinger’s op-ed article “College Students Need to Toughen Up, Quit Their Grade Whining”, originally published in the U.S. News & World Report, Schlesinger asserts that today’s students expect that an average or higher grade should be favored by simply relying on attending classes, without demonstrating much of an improvement in their performance, leading to the watering down of the fair grading system. Schlesinger describes it as “grade inflation”. Schlesinger references a study on student’s expectation of grades conducted by the …show more content…

He states that the understanding of grades has changed from the time when he was a college student and “C” was the average grade. Schlesinger points out two reasons to demonstrate the correlation between grade inflation and faculty meeting the students’ satisfaction on their desired grades. The first reason is when in the case of a B is considered as an average grade, it may demean the truthful assessment system. Secondly, students don’t have a proper understanding of the true value of their work and how it should be evaluated, which will be a disadvantage to them when they meet the real world after graduation of the school. Students should be assessed based …show more content…

Many students have convinced themselves that if they put in a lot of effort, they deserve a higher mark regardless of quality of work. Schlesinger cites the study by Professor Greenberger built on earlier work by Dean Hogge where the findings indicated that more than half of the students responded that in a situation where their effort were high but performance was low and if the instructor knew how much effort students did, then their grade should be ascribed to effort. Schlesinger acknowledges that there is no appropriate measurement of how a student’s effort should be measured. Students want their efforts to be counted when they work hard but their performance don’t give the expected results. On the other hand, how about brilliant students who achieve excellent performance results without making much effort? And here we have a paradox: is there a possibility of fair effort measurement? Can it be estimated as per class attendance or by regular participation in the classes? From my point of view the effort is best measured based on the performance on assigned task. If the student is working very hard, then it will be seen in the work they performed and on their test

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