Louis Menand argues in "What Are Universities For?" that "professionalism has transformed the experience of college. . . . good grades are essential for getting over the hurdle to the next degree program[,] but the content is somehow less real, since most students now perceive that the education that matters to them will take place after college is finished" (262). So a student's university GPA may qualify or disqualify him/her from graduate study, but what about employment? Given the crisis in grade inflation and the difficulty in assessing how a biology major's 3.5 might measure up against an art history major's 3.5, many employers relegate GPA to a secondary (or lower) measure of a job candidate's skill level. Most HR managers also know that GPA becomes even less significant the more experience a person has gained in the field:
Matthew K. Tabor, "GPA Not Crucial to Employers; C Students Get Jobs Anyway"
Jon Morrow, "Twentysomething: Why I Regret Getting Straight As in College"
Saba Berhie, "What Do Employers Really Look For?"
Josh Smith, "Overrated: College GPA a Poor Predictor of Job Hunt Success"
David Koeppel, "Those Low Grades in College May Haunt Your Job Search" (this is an article using some of the same statistics but with a different slant; however, it, too, ends up stressing the point about how other factors compensate for lower GPAs)
I do not expect these statistics and anecdotes to prevent certain students from being concerned about grades--after all, they are often important to admissions committees at medical and law schools, and maintaining a specific GPA may be necessary for acquiring or keeping scholarships and grants, which is no small matter for some of us who could not attend college without them.
But perhaps keeping the overall significance of one's GPA in proper perspective can help reduce anxiety as well as its desperate (and, let's face it, frustrating) extension into what many term "grade-grubbing." Instructors often will say that while we teach because we love the material and sharing it with students, we grade because we're paid to; however, one of the most difficult aspects of the student-faculty relationship is this phenomenon of grade-grubbing. Granted, some of this is the fault of faculty who fail to clearly state their expectations for the class in a syllabus that offers the course grade's strict percentage breakdown and an explicit grading rubric, as Alicia Shepard documents in her 2005 article "As for Everyone!" Students will quickly learn to confront instructors who have little valid rationale for grades they have given, and perhaps this is one of the reasons that Alexa and Daniel voiced their opinions in class today that grades were mainly subjective. But as Christian pointed out, certain aspects of grading are objective (e.g., multiple-choice or true/false tests), and I would argue that maintaining meticulous records of student performance (e.g., participation) and articulating precise assessment standards can keep instructors honest as they evaluate what marks students earn and calculate their final averages.
But as psychologists Ellen Greenberger et al. (2008) have shown, the more frivolous grade challenges also often result from a sense of academic entitlement, defined as students' "expectations of high marks for modest effort and demanding attitudes toward teachers." One of the fallacies underlying this attitude is that grades can somehow evaluate effort, but how could they? Grades can assess only the final product, which is again why precise standards of assessment must be published. But as McGill professor of history Gil Troy has argued, this entitlement can also be blamed on the perception of the university as a supermarket in which students are the customers who are always right as well as "the self-esteem movement that ties evaluation of work with personal judgment" (see Proudfoot for an informative article on these issues). What students--and, apparently, some instructors--can have difficulty understanding is that grades should not take into account a professor's like or dislike of a student. As Wolff states, "Politically motivated favoritism or reprisal is considered a particularly serious violation of professional norms in academic circles" (23), and one would hope any form of favoritism does not play into assessment. This does not mean that behaving disruptively in the classroom, sleeping in class, or acting in a discourteous manner should not be accounted for, especially since these are often violations of course policy and therefore can contribute to not only the personal annoyance for the professor and fellow students but also legitimately lower marks. Conversely, if a student does the work well and at least pretends to have a positive, open-minded (not sycophantic!) attitude toward the course (here are some other suggestions), the student will more than likely receive a decent grade and, coincidentally, the professor's respect. We may dispute whether universities should be the seat of professional training, but at the very least, perhaps what we need is more professional behavior on both sides of the grading divide?
And finally, as implied by Menand in the excerpt I quoted at the beginning of this overly long, convoluted entry, what so many of these challenges seem to boil down to is a fundamental disagreement about what students and teachers expect higher education to be. Alexa stated today that she, like "most students," cares only about good grades and not about learning--is this kind of approach to college a byproduct of seeing the university purely as a professional training camp/launching pad? Is there anyone still left out there who believes in Newman's idea(l) of the university as a sanctuary of knowledge, a place where one might pursue learning for its own sake and, in the process, learn to love learning itself? In what ways might the greater access to higher education and the devaluation of the college degree (see next entry) affect one's ability to preserve what we might think of as this romantic view of the university?
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