This week when Bill sent me the link to an article from The New York Times by Max Roosevelt entitled “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes” (Feb. 18, 2009), my first response was an inward groan. Although we all need the opportunity to collectively kvetch and reflect (sometimes very expressively) on our frustrations with students, I try to resist dwelling at length on what is wrong with “them.” I am always more interested in what we can do right with the students we have. That is not to say that students don’t bring lots of things to college with them that are obstacles to their learning—and unfounded expectations of high grades are clearly among them. But I always figure they are who they are, and we need to meet them there if we want them to come forward with us. Given that, I wonder how we can disabuse students of the notion that they “deserve” a high grade — that “A is the default” — while still inspiring them to genuinely learn and hopefully earn that grade.
The most obvious thing that comes to mind is that we need to be very explicit about our expectations. While this seems simplistic, in my experience it is actually fairly rare for a faculty member to be very clear and concise about their expectations in ways that are meaningful to students. Most of us think our expectations are obvious, and we “know good work when we see it.” However our standards are often foreign to our students—especially to freshmen—and we really do have an obligation to spell out for them what we expect them to be able to do. In The New York Times piece the author notes students often believe that if they have tried hard and put a lot of effort into something, they should receive a high grade. This problem is perhaps best addressed by making clear that outcomes, not inputs, are evaluated. While some students are always going to feel entitled (and more so in this current generation than those past according to psychologist Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable that Ever Before ), being explicit about what “A” work looks like gives you much firmer ground to stand on when students come to convey to you their frustration with unsatisfied expectations. An even better practice is giving them the grading criteria or rubric that you use to grade an assign beforehand, so that they can evaluate their own performance. By making the process more transparent, we help to shift the academic responsibility back to our students. As you might predict, they won’t always come to the same conclusion that you do about the grade they should receive. But they will have a much clearer sense of how you got to that grade, and how they can work to get to the one they think they deserve. Admittedly it takes some fine crafting of thoughts and words to explain clearly what constitutes your standards, but this is an important part of educating our students. If their standards are not our standards, don’t we have some responsibility to articulate for them what our standards are? If they don’t know something important that we think they should know, shouldn’t we teach it to them? We also need to talk to one another about our standards, and perhaps make them explicit in our programs and departments (a good example is of this is posted by the Psychology Department at the University of Victoria).
Happily the article ultimately moves past complaint to potential solutions. Perhaps most importantly it reminds us that as educators we sometimes have to educate beyond our field and explain to our students the process of education itself. Research shows that the more we talk with students about their learning and explain why we approach teaching the way we do, the more they learn. And while we all might wish that students’ focus was intently on their learning when they enter our class (and somehow our recollection is that we were always very focused in our classes when we were students), it is often on a million other things—financial concerns, social pressures, family problems – that collectively reduces their approach to our class to “I deserve an ‘A’” at times. We can lament it (and believe me, I do). But ultimately it is more productive to show them that the learning required to earn that “A” is what gives meaning to the grade itself.
