A few weeks back, I wrote about how frustrating it is when a student drops out of the course, especially when they are passing. It is equally frustrating to watch a student never try, and then get the “not surprising” failing grades, and then quit. As I wrote last time, 25% of my course grade comes from easy, in-class work or even merely showing up prepared. There is simply no challenge to those assessments, assuming you do the bare minimum and pay attention in the class. Still, along the way, so many students fail because they do not try hard enough.
I will give back the major assessments and some students will get the inevitable 65 or 58 or 43 or worse. I will beg them to come talk to me so we can fix this error early. Most never do…stunning right? They fail something and get an invitation to visit me to fix the issue, and yet they won’t. One semester, I even offered students a free “new life” concept where they could re-take any exam as many times as necessary to get the grade they want. Only a few students ever took me up on that, and many in that class dropped the course failing.
The more annoying issue, and the point of this blog post, is how we have tragically redefined the concept of a “C” grade. Before the 1980s, everyone understood that an “A” grade meant exceptional, a “B” grade was above average and a “C” grade was average. Only a “D” grade was not good, because now it meant that your learning, your grasp of the material was below average. Charles Murray has been writing about this for over a decade; that we have lost our understanding of what a bell curve actually means.
In doing so, we have slowly redefined what a “C” means. The number of students who now believe that a “C” is a bad grade or a failing grade is staggering. Now, understand, I do realize that for parents, they want their child to do well. And, perhaps in the early grades, perhaps even through middle school, a “smart” person will make mostly high grades (A or B). By the time you have hit college, however, that idea easily falls apart. It is illogical to assume that a person would be exceptional in every and any type of course. Instead, the majority of students, especially in an intro course, will end up being average.
To lose the idea of “average” is to lose touch with what rigor means. As I wrote last week, the two students who really saddened me were both passing. They had invested about 10 weeks of their lives and hundreds of dollars into this course. Then, they merely threw it away. Sure, the student who is failing at least drops the course to avoid the “F”, deciding that the loss of money is apparently worth not dealing with an “F” on their transcript. But, the student who is passing is making a poor judgment call on leaving the class.
They appear to be saying “unless I can get an “A” or at worse a “B” in the class, I will quit trying and drop out.” Yet, if no one is average in the topic, then everyone gets an “A”, and yet that makes everyone average. The reality is that most of us are average at many things, and even below average in some areas. For myself, science was the topic that held little interest to me, and while I could get “good grades” in high school, once I was in college I was in trouble. I had to take two science courses, which I did reluctantly. In one I had an amazing professor who inspired me to put forth an extraordinary effort and I barely got a “B”–but trust me, that “B” was one of my proudest grades. The second course had an average professor who didn’t really seem to care about me, and as such, I put for my best average effort, which for me as a low “C” grade in which I had to do well on the final to keep that “C.” In other words, I am average, or more likely below average, in the topic of science.
You know what? That’s okay. I am not above average in everything, not even most things. Where I have my strengths, I am exceptional, but in other areas, my grade would be a “C” or worse.
If we hope to really turn the country around, we have to start to get a lot more honest in education. More students need an honest grade, which will mean many will be getting “C”s or even failing classes. More professors and high school teachers need to start raising the bar, bringing in more rigor (not more busy work) and high expectations. We need to tell students that a “C” is not failure, as long as they did their best effort. We need to do this in order to inform students that they must work diligently if they hope to move forward in life.
If we don’t do this, ultimately, we’ll find ourselves where everyone has passed college with a near-4.0 grade and yet no ability to think for themselves, to work hard at challenging issues, stay in the hard thing till it is finished or accept their best as reward enough.