Most university students believe that if they're "trying hard," a professor should reconsider their grade.That, unfortunately, is what comes of spouting meaningless pap like... "no child left behind."
One-third say that if they attend most of the classes for a course, they deserve at least a B, while almost one-quarter "think poorly" of professors who don't reply to e-mails the same day they're sent.
The fact is... whether you chose to blame it on nature or nurture... we are not all equally constituted or qualified. It's why not everybody gets to be a theoretical physicist. It's why some people choose to be paratroopers and some choose to enter a convent. It's why we have prisons.
There are kids with organic, or social disabilities. There are kids who, for whatever reason, are emerging sociopaths. And there are kids who, are... yes, just not especially motivated, or intelligent.
But we seem to have convinced these kids that hard work, that earned merit... somehow doesn't matter.
Those are among the revelations in a newly published study examining students' sense of academic entitlement, or the mentality that enrolling in post-secondary education is akin to shopping in a store where the customer is always right.The sad truth is, there will always be individuals who are left behind. Trying to convince kids that they are all, regardless of ability... equally entitled... is a dangerous and fated game.
Wake up and smell the species.
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FROM THE COMMENTS:
"As a professor at the University of Toronto medical school, I can tell you that this is exactly how it is. We have been conditioned to grade everyone average as "very good", and someone who is mediocre and barely competent as 'good'."**********
"Only the absolute basket cases are graded as 'fails to meet expectations'."
"There are many reasons for this, but the foremost among them is that there is a huge disincentive in terms of hassle and even harassment to grade anyone negatively. Some failed students, and even some who did not pass with a high enough mark for their liking, have threatened legal action and made baseless accusations of harassment or discrimination."
"Failing someone is tantamount to accepting that you will be spending hours in meetings, forced remediation of the student, and possibly be accused of god-knows-what. No one can handle that grief unless they are a masochist."
LAST WORD: The fuzzy-bunny "self-esteem" movement
The self-esteem movement began in the 1970s, when ideology-inspired social engineering — the aim to “construct” a happy, confident person — replaced knowledge-based learning as an educators’ mandate.*
The idea was to reduce the supposedly bad stress caused by competition and objective standards, whose disparate consequences were thought to undermine less successful children’s fragile self-esteem. Instead of linking reward to achievement, children were rewarded for completing tasks, basically just for showing up.
