Well, wait..
…what’s so bad about everyone getting good grades?
Grades are the first yardstick we embrace as a society. They simply and effectively quantify effort and intuition. If everyone is getting the same (best) grade, or even something close to it, there’s no way to distinguish between the motivated and unmotivated, or between quantitative and qualitative aptitudes. It’s to our collective detriment to wash out our sole indicator of performance, especially in college — the ‘buffer zone’ to adulthood.
In concurrence with the increasingly competitive job market and record numbers of enrolled students, grade inflation devalues the bachelor’s degree as nothing more than a multi-thousand dollar cover charge to professional employment. When grades don’t matter, education becomes a necessary gesture, rather than a conscious choice or expanding experience. According to a recent New York Times article, some CEOs believe firmly “recent graduates had emerged from universities whose weakened requirements didn’t prepare them for the complex jobs that companies must now fill”, and so have begun to ignore some majors in the arts and sciences altogether even with a stellar GPA. While a portion of the difficulty in hiring fresh college grads with an extensive background in art history is attributed to the highly technical nature of many of today’s career tracks, the mention of ‘weakened requirements’ belies a faltering belief in the ability of intelligent and motivated students to pick up skills on the job (as a function of their undergraduate education).
We’re preparing to shoot ourselves in the collective foot. Source: fatamerican.tv
Furthermore, some posit that grade inflation hampers excellence; students, they suspect, will be less likely to succeed fantastically, instead accepting ‘good enough’. New York Times Economix blogger Catherine Rampell quotes grade inflation researchers Stuart Rojstaczer and Chris Healy:
“When college students perceive that the average grade in a class will be an A, they do not try to excel,” they write. “It is likely that the decline in student study hours, student engagement, and literacy are partly the result of diminished academic expectations.”
But everyone knows the American image is built on wild success of the individual. Our technological developments, business operations, and educational institutions set the bar worldwide, and our workplaces are wildly competitive in the global marketplace. Can we really trust today’s insurmountable problems to a generation of uninspired and average students? I suppose only time will tell.