The essay of Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s by Brent Staples clearly mimics a problem solution essay that is very heavily focused on the problem. Staples takes a very assertive standpoint in insisting that over inflation of grades due to particular pressure on adjunct professors are devaluing degrees from collegiate institutions. Staples is convincing in this assertion as he uses generalized facts, “In some cases, campus wide averages have crept up from a C just 10 years ago, to a B-plus today.” This alarming quotation is used as evidence that supports Staples’ claim of a major problem facing collegiate institutions nationwide. The solution that Staples proposes, is a new grade point average formula.
Brent Staples wrote a beautiful, yet unconvincing article about colleges giving away “free” A’s to students. The article, “Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s,” appeared in 1988 in the New York Times paper (Staples 935). Staples himself has earned a PhD in psychology and is a member of the New York Times editorial board (935). The general purpose of this article was to inform the audience that over the past couple of years, university grading policies have become extremely lenient (935). The audience is a very limited to educational administrations and alumni of major universities.
Patton attempts to build his argument further by providing the current average costs of college tuitions, then reveals a line chart of the inflation over the past 20 years. In comparison with the $9,139 (in-state public) and $135,010 (private) tuition rates for the 2014-15 years, the author claims, “If education inflation continues to average 5.2%, the cost of tuition and fees for a four-year public university in 10 years will be between $65,590 (in-state public) and $224,124 (private),” (Patton, 2015). This claim seems outrageous and serious until you realize there are several errors in his calculations. Patton forgets that the value of the American dollar inflates by at least 2.3% at the same time that tuition prices increase by 5.2%, essentially dividing the intensity of this inflation by half. To add onto this, predicting the rates of inflation by an entire 10 years, which is half of the sample provided, is clearly extrapolation, thus making this calculation unreliable.
In “From Degrading to De-Grading,” Alfie Kohn criticizes current grading systems and their alleged harm to students. Kohn first lists three main problems with grading and then adds seven more. In summary, grading results in students showing little interest in learning, students choosing easier assignments, and less creative students (p. 254-255). The next seven points expose grading as unreliable, distracting, and tedious. Grading also incites cheating and ruins relationships between students and teachers (p. 255-257).
Many times an article can be looked over, and not taken very seriously when it seems as if the author has no proof or evidence. With this being said Phil Primack wrote the article “Doesn’t Anybody Get a C Anymore?” Where he from the beginning established that there was a problem when he explained how a student said a B was a “low grade.” Primack used a lot of quotes from other people and professors that validate his main claim, and the points he is making. A similar article is Stuart Rojstaczer article “Grade Inflation Gone Wild” where he clearly states the problem of grade inflation.
In the American society, it seems two of the things that are mentioned the most are money and education. What most of us do not think about is the correlation of economics to education. Economics has a big effect on our expectations of educational environments over time. It seems that more and more money is going into schools but nothing is changing in them. Schools are still cutting out electives and still can’t afford some of the basic things that students should have in their learning environment.
Professors try to justify the sudden rise in grades but their explanations hardly convinces anyone. Mark Edmundson a professor at University of Virginia, writes about this in his essay, On the Uses of a Liberal Education,. He states, "a professor at Stanford [University] recently explained grade inflation in the humanities by observing that the undergraduates were getting smarter every year; the higher grades simply recorded how much better they were than their predecessors. Sure" (Edmundson 396). Edmundson 's sarcastic tone in his writing shows that he does not believe the Stanford professor 's explanation for grade averages going up.
“If Grade Inflation Continues A College Bachelor’s Degree will have just as much credibility as a high school diploma”by Walter E.Williams which happens to be true people that go to college don’t have to try as hard to get a decent grade for most people they just planout expect to have a good grade when they did not work for it. But whos fault is to blame the students or teachers. While looking into Stuart Rojstaczer story the “Grade Inflation Gone Wild”. Sturt studies the way that grade inflation work while doing his research Sturt found out that colleges and universities grades has gone up and down also level out all during the 60s 70s also the 80s. Grade has continued to go up most of the school GPAs are 3.0 or above.
Grade inflation is something he doesn’t seem to view as a problem. He
Grades are as valuable as star-shaped stickers, yet they have the power to lay the foundation of our entire lives. The grades we earn have no commercial value, but students invest millions into taking a class to get a grade. In Jerry Farber’s essay “A Young Person’s Guide to the Grading System,” he crushes society’s constant need for competition by pointing out all of the major flaws in the grading system and offering a new credit system as a solution. Farber is correct by claiming that the grading system is flawed, stressful, and overall, useless. Farber builds his essay on the basis that grades are problematic for the school system to use.
Farber believes that the grades create phony motivation and students only want to please the teachers. According to Farber, students only retain the material until they are graded on it. No longer having a grading system would leave students having no drive in school. Schools would no longer have a basic form of ranking the students and see how well they are doing. Students would no longer want to see the point in striving to be the best when everyone is ranked the same.
There is a lot of pressure to get good grades so that you can get a good job. "Grades can determine your future, and if you fail this then you 're not going on to college, you 're going to work at McDonald 's and live out of a car," said high school student Spike. Where is the integrity? (ABC News)
In Kurt Wiesenfeld’s article “Making the Grade”, he address the issue that students want a higher grade than they deserve. He goes on to prove this be by giving examples of previous students that he has had and what can happen when students get the grades that they want and not what they deserve. In Wiesenfeld’s article he states that about ten percent of students that take his class do not care about their grades until final grades are over. “You might groan and moan, but you accepted it as the outcome of your efforts or lack thereof,” Wiesenfeld stated.
There are a lot of kids that go to public schools and have a grading system in which their teacher/facilitator has to use to tell whether they will pass the course or not. Not all students learn the same way or understand the information being taught as quickly as others. Having a grading system determines how well you are doing in the class. If the student is not doing well, it could basically tell the student that they are not going to pass and they will start to think that they shouldn’t try. Not only is a grading scale hard on some students, but as well as the teachers because they are the ones that have to keep up with all of the grades that the students produce on their assignments.
Most students feel that the grades they get in school reflects them as a person but is this necessarily true? Schools have taught them that if they don't reach a certain academic standard they are not viewed as smart. Grades have a huge part in making people believe that those grades are given to them based upon their knowledge and not exactly on how hard a student works to get those grades. Grades do not depict the hard work a student puts in, but it shows how much knowledge someone has. The grading scale for every school varies from one school to the next.
