The most frequently e-mailed story in The New York Times today is a short piece that describes how college students today expect a good grade as a matter of course.

As the article describes, students today do not hesitate to negotiate a better grade and seem to expect a good grade (of at least "B") simply for attendance and completing assigned reading.

This behavior is seen as a change, and several causes are suggested: parental pressure, achievement anxiety, expectations forged in pre-collegiate education.

The article struck a responsive chord with me, because I've encountered this sense of entitlement when teaching in France. Here are my observations and hypotheses:

  • From having run a European study-abroad program for a diverse group of international students, I can attest that grade negotiation is widespread; it's not limited to American students, or even to native English speakers. It also affects Brazilians, Slovenes, Poles, Indians, and Australians.
  • Among French students –with the caveat that I've encountered mostly the "cream of the crop" among advanced students at highly selective schools– I've found a bizarre disconnect between the lived, collective classroom experience and individual expectations of exam performance.
  • There's a disconnect because some students seem to think that the exam will be dissociated from classroom experience; in other words, doing the readings or participating to class are not necessarily thought of as the foundations of a good exam grade.
  • There's also a disconnect because every student, individually, seems quick to self-evaluate as  better than average.
  • My explanation: democratization, understood as a trend towards more egalitarian societies. It's great that people talk less about class (or class struggle) and view skeptically all sorts of hereditary claims. In this environment, students see themselves as equal vis-a-vis the professor, so grade negotiation makes sense.
  • I find that students want good grades for themselves, but don't want poorer grades for everyone else. I'll hear student A say, "my friends X, Y, and Z all got a good grade, and I think I should get the same grade." I don't hear student A say, "I worked harder than my friends X, Y, and Z, so you must have made a mistake; I deserve a better grade than theirs."
  • From what I've seen, schools are also made uncomfortable by grading issues. Partly this reflects a tension between selective admissions (designed to group the best students) and bell curve expectations when grades are given. If the school selects from the top quartile, why shouldn't its students receive only grades of A or B? This is a legitimate argument, or at least topic for discussion. Partly, too, it reflects an acceptance that students will contest below-average grades (maybe even grades that are simply average), putting demands on administrative time and effort to arbitrate disputes. I do wish schools better communicated with faculty about the desired shape of a grade curve, its midpoint and shape. I also wish schools communicated more clearly with students (and their families) about grading policies.

Tom Friedman wrote a bestseller, The World Is Flat. Friedman's subject was globalization, and his metaphor was slightly off: he really meant that the world today is small. Flatness, I would argue, more aptly describes student expectations with respect to grading. The world today is flat because younger people view the world with democratic, egalitarian eyes.

The much-read, often-e-mailed New York Times article show cased research published recently in a scholarly journal, The Journal of Youth and Adolescence. I've already vented about these "teaser" articles that spark curiosity about scholarly research that turns out to be extremely hard to access outside a university research library. Taking a cue from mainstream media, I wish academic publishers would make a selection of articles available to the general public, at no charge (or with a super-simple payment system).