Breaking Economic News: Recession Hits Grades!

Finally done with all my grading -- now time to move on to all the wonderful administrivia that comes with the end of the year. Ah, the seminars to assist with, the teaching portfolio to update, the academic articles to hammer out, the lesson planning to prepare for! Smells like my vacation time swirling down the toilet. Before I launch into this summer's work, though, I have noticed a new trend during this last week of school; not sure what to make of it.

Students are bitching about grades more than usual. Not my students, although I have had two bitching so far (I expect 2-3 more, they're just too lazy to come figure out what they've gotten yet). Every student of El Hijo has bitched about their grades. Yesterday, the main day for returning portfolios, students were cursing in the hallways, marching down to the main office, and in what looks to me like unprecedented numbers -- filing grade appeals. Some left the main office crying with their parents. WTF is going on? We've not really been grading any differently than the last semester. We don't have a new crop of students with different academic backgrounds who would be more inclined to bitch.

I think it's the recession/depression.

No, honestly. I think that the situation with the economy is probably causing students to tense up about losing scholarships, to worry about having to repeat classes (and spend another semester or more here), and it's most definitely probably causing their parents to take a greater interest in their grades. I would say money is the deciding factor here. Grades can cause you to lose scholarships, but I bet for the first time (for many students), they're paying attention to the implications lower grades will have on their transcripts as well. Job markets are tight in most fields -- suddenly it makes a difference if you're a "C" engineer or a "B" engineer. It always made a difference, of course, but getting students to realize it made a difference was another story. So, this is a new academic development, at least at my university.

Too bad student work ethic isn't really catching up to the problem. El Hijo and I had a protracted argument at lunch about what the core of the issue for grade appeals is. I maintain that it's about student selfishness and misconceptions, especially when it comes to a class like writing or rhetoric. Students already think that essay judgment is subjective, and in a way it is -- if you miss a math problem, you obviously got the wrong answer. If you are illogical with words, it takes a few more steps to point out why. I'm not saying that writing is more complex than math (because Meg will Internet Kill me); but rather, it is just as complex as math. And just like you have some profs who will give you partial credit for at least working the math problem but screwing up the answer, you have some profs who will give you partial credit for doing most of the work that arguments take, but screwing up your logic. Just as there are chem profs who will fail the whole problem, even if all you did was screw up the last step, because it's WRONG, dammit, there are English profs who will fail your whole paper, even though all you did was screw up one part, because it's WRONG, dammit. So there is subjectivity, but students I think tend to process it differently. They see that kind of subjectivity more as the whim of the prof doing the grading.

That's part of what goes into student selfishness when it comes to grades. Set aside for the moment how some of them view grades as a transaction -- I pay money, you give A. Unless you've been really aggrieved (like the prof said "Sleep with me", you said no, s/he failed you), grade appeals are inherently based on the fact that you think you know better than the prof -- someone who spent years and years in the field -- about how to judge your own work; work that you didn't know how to do before you took the class. Grade appeals say that you're the expert, not the actual expert. Most students who do a grade appeal have a massively overinflated sense of the value of their work. A stands for superior, after all, and B is "above average." C's are average. C means "average college student work". College students themselves might be "above average" in terms of academic potential compared to everyone else in the country, but put against a roomful of themselves, they are not all going to be above average, obviously. This reality is matched by the statistics of grade appeal success -- only 3% of grade appeals are actually ever approved. You could say that there is probably some institutional bias going on; but universities take great measures to ensure that the review process is blind and impartial. I'm sure some profs go into it thinking they're going to side with the prof. But based on the people who are appealing, I have to say they just have no idea -- or refuse to believe -- that their work is just that sub-par.

So the answer to your grade woes, people, is not to put pressure on the prof; it's to get in and work harder. Maybe if you didn't have 13 absences (in a two day a week class, no less), you might have pulled better than a fail. When you've missed seven out of fifteen weeks of class, there's probably a reason you didn't have a quality piece of work. Just like some people are looking for part time jobs, you might need to make studying your part time job -- one you don't go in to do for only a few hours, say midnight to 3 a.m., before your deadline. Just a thought.

-- DV