Now, don’t take that the wrong way — none of us actually wants a C. Rather, what we want is for our A’s to mean we tirelessly worked beyond what was expected, poured all our energy into the assignment and did an all-around stellar job.
Grade inflation is an issue plaguing universities across the country, causing a disease in students of laziness and entitlement.
In a society where everyone wants to be special and where no one wants to be average, grade inflation just prolongs that disease. It instills in students the value that average work is worth an A, and a C denotes failure.
Studies show grades began rising when professors awarded higher grades to help students avoid the draft. Now an A has come to mean an ordinary level of achievement. But in an increasingly competitive society, what does this mean for our future?
Jobs are getting more competitive and college grades should reflect that level of competition as well.
None one is entitled to an A or a job.
C’s should be given out to someone who does what a C is intended to mean — average work. That means doing exactly what is written on the rubric, what the teacher outlines in class and the bare bones of the assignment.
B’s should be given to someone who goes above and beyond — to the person who did supplemental readings or added their own creativity to the project.
And an A should be reserved for the best of the best, for the person who stayed awake until the wee hours of the morning working on his or her project, not the person who stayed up until the wee hours because he or she procrastinated on Facebook.
What incentive do we have to go above and beyond when we know the bare bones will get us an A anyway? What incentive does the class have to study if we know a teacher will just add 10 points to our score since we all failed?
Grade inflation gives us no reason to discover learning on our own and to strive for the excellence that MU and other universities worldwide pride themselves in.
But combatting the grade inflation disease requires participation from all teachers. It does no good for one teacher to grade on an accurate scale if we know the teacher next door makes getting an A just as easy as getting an insult thrown at you by Sister Cindy.
Professors need to instill in us that a C is an average grade. There’s nothing wrong with a C. It means students did all the work and followed all the instructions. And students need to accept that a C isn’t necessarily a bad grade. It is just an average grade.
No one actually wants a C. But knowing that a C is an average grade just provides students with more opportunity to learn, grow and expand their minds.
So, why do teachers give out A’s so easily? Maybe it’s because they are afraid students will hate them for giving them a B+, or they are worried they’ll lose their green smiley face with sunglasses on RateMyProfessors.com. Perhaps they think that giving us a magic A will somehow make the knowledge somehow seep into our heads. Maybe they are afraid we won’t like them.
But you know what we don’t like? We don’t like that we aren’t being pushed to our full potential. We don’t like that doing the bare minimum is A-worthy. And we don’t like that there is no way to truly distinguish the really stellar students when average students can take an easy class and get an A as well.
The current majority opinion is that a C is failing. But it’s not. An F is failing. A C is just proof that school is not a cakewalk, but instead a place for knowledge and learning.
Why would students go out of their way to learn, do well and go outside of completing a grading rubric checklist if the class is easy on grading?
We see this feeling of entitlement in too many facets of America. Let’s not bring it to our education system. Just because you paid for a course doesn’t mean you deserve an A in it. Let’s bring back the intrinsic value of learning, and not concede that you get an A simply for showing up, doing the readings and then going home to watch TV and go on Facebook.
Instead, let’s go back to the idea that a C is actually average. That way, when we get an A, we’ll know that we earned it, we deserved it and we are a more intelligent person because of it. And maybe we’ll even hang it up on the refrigerator.
