Your grade
I frankly don't care about it, and most of us don't, but that seems to be all you want to talk about. A pity, really. I understand that it is the only tangible reward you can see for your work at this time, but no one other than you will know or care about your GPA (with rare exceptions). In fact, you probably don't want to work for someone that scours your transcript. Grading is easily the worst part of my job. I'd guess that getting the grade en route to getting your ticket punched is paramount for 9 out of 10 of you. Ah, but that other one, that's the one for whom I am here.
posted by Dead Man Blogging at
11:59 PM
2 Comments:
I think this phenomenon is a result of the current high school education mentality of "teach how to get a good grade on the test" as opposed to "teach how to think". My 10th grade English class was mostly preoccupied with teaching how to get a good grade the MCAS and the PSAT, and not critical thinking skills that would allow us to think through the test. When students are trained to start salivating when the "B+" bell is rung, regardless of what it took to get there, this seems to happen.
This isn't to say that I haven't been guilty of this myself. I can think of a handful of classes where my recollection of the material is "A-" or "C+".
It's unfortunate, really, that the most engaging classes I've taken are incidentally the ones where I never really minded if I got an A or a D. The fruits of grade school and undergraduate education have been boiled down to a letter or a 3 digit number.
With the well-intentioned but utterly misguided learning outcomes assessment movement, traditional academic notions of tenure and content, increased student competition for entrance to and graduation from multiple levels of education, various facets of human nature, and any number of other factors, this phenomenon is, sadly, unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
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