The gist of the article is kids believe their grades should be based on effort, not mastery of the subject.
In this world kids think of school like a contract, “I put in the effort, now you owe me an A”.
This is how we get grade inflation. This is how you mask who may be having struggles. There’s an element of resilience that is taken away. Employers notice as well.
I go back to the fact we live in a global world and that this is occurring at our elite schools ultimately has an effect on all of us, as these are our country’s future leaders.
View: https://x.com/chronicle/status/1992968702032072978?s=46&t=kOX31MjxS-IJnH5C6XWDGA
This is a problem, and I think to examine what the policies around grading should be we need to focus first on the goal. What is the goal of our educational institutions.
Is our goal is to educate students so that they can be healthy and productive members of our society?
Is it more braud, to teach them that hard work results in benefits?
Is it to teach them how to negotiate the current world, or how we want them to negotiate an imperfect world.
The Capitalist world is not what I was taught in school, it is not anywhere as close to as idealistic as I had thought. The ability to get away with "cheating" is far more valuable than I thought. The parent and so some extent the school system must determine what our children should learn, and its much deeper than reading, writing and arithmetic. Its how to navigate our culture and more specifically our economy.
My goal has always been to cultivate an education for my children that enables them to be healthy and able to get the things they need in our culture, without harming others. Our system is flawed in several ways for such a set up... Cheaters generally get better grades, if they are good at cheating. Overachievers often sacrifice happiness and wellbeing to attain the trophy.... the grade. Hard workers will, on average, do better than less handworkers, but cheating often leapfrogs this result. I have tried to teach my children to work hard and not focus on the grade, but focus on what you learned.
I've had mixed results with this method.
Child #1, got B's and C's with one or two D's in High School. He ended up going to Community College then transferring to the University of Florida, he will get a prestigious degree and nobody will look back and say, ya, but you had to do the Community College route due to your grades.
Child #2 worked her ass off, she took the hardest classes and got straight A's. Never once in school did she get a "B", she scored way above average on the SAT, but.... not so high that she was accepted into the University of Florida outright. She is going to FSU, which is a great school but not as highly ranked as UF.
Child #3 seems to be following the path of Child #1, average grades, but she almost always finds a way to get what she wants.
I suspect all three will follow different but very successful paths, but If I were hiring someone, I would not focus so much on the prestige of the school, or the grades, but how they attained those achievements and why. If you want a hard worker, hire Child 2, if you want a person who knows how to get things done without the hard work, hire children #'s 1 and 3.
Another kid from the neighborhood, barely got out of High School, but he found a way to pass, he went to college and was unable to pass any classes his first semester. He does however have a brilliant mind in some ways, so when he found the perfect fit for his type of intelligence, he has succeeded, thus far way beyond the kids in his class will likely ever succeed, because he found the right situation for his type of drive and intelligence.
They will all be very successful, and I would go to different kids for different things.
Anyway, my point is that grades are meaningless unless you understand the person, how and why they got them.
There are some people who are not very intelligent, and no matter how hard they work they will never get A's, but they are often better suited to deal with out economy and social system than those who easily get straight A's.