How Does Shepard Demonstrate The Common Phenomenon Of Grade Harassment

Summary:

Shepard used her own experience to demonstrate the common phenomenon of grade harassment from the students and introduced the reasons of student’s high expectation on their grades. She began with describing her teaching experience in the American University. After she completed her student’s grading, she was bombarded with the emails questioning about the grades. As a new teacher in the university, she seeks for advices from other teachers in the apartment and they all encountered the same problems. They conclude that students believe that working hard entitles them to an A. Although university conferences advised teaches to make grading transparent in order to avoid grade harassment, it wont actually eliminate students’ desire. Shepard

From the students’ prospective, a high GPA is extremely important. Many students nowadays are rigorously trying to get in to a graduate school or medical school because that is the only way to make them more competitive in the current job market. However, they might ignore the significant process of getting a good grade. Shepard explained it in the article “Many students believe that simply working hard—though not necessarily doing excellent work—entitles them to an A.” Indeed, the students twisted the definition of an A. They thought if they work hard on certain projects or assignments will automatically award them with an A. From teachers’ prospective, only the students in the top percentile could get an A. Teachers believe that the grades are not everything, and the most important thing is the knowledge students get out of the class. However, teachers’ and the students’ opinions are

Shepard pointed out that “students are the victims of grade inflation in secondary school.” Indeed, high schools tend to give an A easily because they want more students to be able to attend college. Students then have a high expectation on getting similar grades in college. From my graduation class, most of the people fall into the top 15% categories have a GPA around 3.8-4 and all of them certainly did not earn that GPA in college. Also, Shepard stated that “Men who got low graders could be drafted to the Vietnam War.” It contributes to contemporary idea that only better grades could get a better job. People are scared to suffer from poverty and they believe that getting good grades can prevent all the bad things happen. In additional, Shepard pointed out that “the spread of graduate schools were only A’s and B’s were passing grades. That soon got passed on to undergraduates and set the standard.” Students believe that only getting A’s and B’s can fit into the passing category and all the other grades are extremely unacceptable. Lastly, education now became a consumer product. Parents paid huge amount of tuition and they expect their children do outstandingly in college. Consequently, students view grades that is lower than A is unacceptable. However, I disagree because the purpose of education should be creating and delivering