Students, with help from their universities, are perverting the whole idea of grades as marks of achievement.
A professor I know now that a grade is merely a starting point for negotiation. This struck me because I was dealing with a grade appeal totally without merit.
In an earlier article I wrote about the common mistake of confusing effort and achievement. Things would be a little better if that were the problem with university grades today. There's a lot of that, but the problem goes deeper than confusion to cynical exploitation of university regulations.
Students now readily avail themselves of all the measures that have been implemented to protect them against arbitrariness and bias. The privacy rules that prevent professors from accessing students marks in courses but their own; the complicated appeal procedures; the preferential arrangements available from "special needs" offices; all of these afford students many ways to parlay mediocre performance into impressive grade averages.
Again, if what's going on were just students knowingly trying to bargain their way up the grade-scale, things wouldn't be quite so bad. But it's worse than a combination of laziness and opportunism. What we're dealing with is no less than a reconception of grades from indicators of performance to marks assigned on the basis of an adversarial process.
The best indication of this adversarial conception is the insistence on the part of many students that exams bear only their student numbers so professors won't know whose work they're grading. Students also insist course-evaluation forms be anonymous and not be available to professors until the final grades are in.
What makes things still worse is that university administrators work very hard to placate students. Deans rarely back professors in disputes with students, seeking always to reach "compromises" that invariably give the students all or most of what they want. Universities are now corporations, and their "customers" always have the edge on their staffs.
Sadly, these problems are worst in the humanities, largely because of the latitude for interpretation and consequent inherent inexactness of marking. Just where students should most be broadening their minds by engaging with the material they're taught, they're rethinking that material as so much data to be regurgitated to establish the best basis for negotiating the highest grades they can get.
The ethical wrongs in all this are that universities are abdicating their intellectual authority for enrollments and fatter alumni contributions while students are turning achievement assessment into self-interested bazaar bargaining.
My thanks to Brian Hunter.
