Last week when I was in a cafe waiting for my mediumskimicedmocha, I overhead one student say to another, “Of course it’s true that professors grade easier than TAs”, and the other student agreed with that statement.
Of course! I rather liked this indication that we professors might actually become nicer with time, as opposed to more cranky and mean.
But do you agree with these students?
Yes. In my experience, beginning academics definitely feel the need to make themselves feel more important by being super strict with students. Normally, they get over it pretty fast.
There is nothing cuter than a young academic announcing in a trembling voice filled with profound insecurity, “I never give As in my courses because nobody can know this material well enough to deserve an A!” A few years later, academics look back on such memories and laugh.
Clarissa's Blog 
Over the past thirty years, there has been a serious epidemic of grade inflation across the US. For example, at Harvard more than 90 per cent of all students graduate summa cum laude. This is a ludicrous result and eliminates all signaling value for a Harvard degree. The reasons for grade inflation vary. In merit pay systems, like George Mason University, many faculty give high grades in return for high teaching evaluations from the students. In non-merit pay systems, many faculty simply seek cozy relations with students or are indoctrinated in relativist ideology.
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So, either we have the opportunistic ideology of the market or the mushy values of the anti-market?
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Most students (although not all) are perfectly capable of living with bad grades and understanding that they are well-deserved.
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It’s good that some maturity still exists. Here is a short story. When I came to Australia, I didn’t like anything I experienced. It seemed like a really intense, pulsating reality had been reduced to something watered down; tepid. Later I realized there was some raging intensity beneath the surface and that everybody had been repressing their real emotions. That was in the abusive workplace situation. And Lo! I discovered, too, that I had been repressing mine, ever since migrating at the age of 15. It had become my way to cope. Anyway, armed with that insight and with health that had been substantially undermined through ongoing tolerance of the intolerable, I moved on. But I took with me some very painful knowledge that my relative happiness along with other people’s ideological construct of my identity had lent much steam to me being targeted. It seemed to me I had been an object of envy, even though there was no basis for this, in the sense that my previous life in Zimbabwe could not have been anything these Westerners could relate to, as it certainly did not involve having material goods or particularly high status or anything like that.
It perturbed me because I had to make a living and was worried about running into the same situation again. I did not understand, at that time, enough about the complex psychodynamics both in myself and in other people. Some of it seemed to have to do with cultural and political perceptions, which then had gained an emotional load of personal aggrievement. I mean this on both sides — I also felt aggrieved after the ring leader of the harrassment proclaimed, “Great! Now we can get an Australian to do the job.” On the first day I had started the job she has been speaking very loudly on the phone to someone about how she disapproved of the organisation employing someone from Zimbabwe.
The legacy of this situation was to deeply disturb me, as I did not know how the problem might be prevented from arising in future situations. I still did not have enough self-knowledge or knowledge of others to have any confidence in not walking into another minefield.
I did not know what people wanted from me, but I understood the structure of their psyches was different from mine. So, I tried the solution of adaptation — becoming the same, as much as possible.
However, I could never really be the same, as I was skeptical. I also saw too much that seemed nice on the surface of it, but was actually manipulative underneath. For instance, instead of suggesting that I need to gain a particular skill that was lacking, behavior modification psychology was tried on me, perhaps so as to avoid direct confrontation or perhaps as cultural way of making me feel free to do anything I chose, in a situation not governed by choice.
I began to understand Western culture as being concerned with ego — ego gratification (the maintenance of an illusion of freedom) and ego sensitivity: (One must not speak directly to me, for fear of upsetting one’s ego.)
I continued to try to assimilate myself to this logic, but it proved impossible in every instance. The problem was I could see through the illusion of freedom in every instance, right down to the base of necessity — that certain things just have to occur to keep the system running, but nobody wants to state what these are. The lack of clarity was particularly vexing, because I didn’t know whether people were really giving me a choice about something or whether it was a necessary part of the job I had to do. Also, I felt like I was still on trial as a migrant, since I had not passed the first test, in the first workplace, of assimilating enough not to be targeted.
So, I continued to try learning the new “Western” culture, which was based on gratifying one’s egoistic desires for an illusion of total freedom, whilst not offending other egos, whose true emotions were deeply repressed.
I gained the impression over time that what was required of me — although I had no name for it at the time — was narcissistic codependency. I was to gratify the egos of anyone who asked me to provide for them. That seemed to be an accurate interpretation of the codified message that came across to me as a demand for the illusion of absolute freedom. I had to furnish this illusion for others. Only, I was disinclined and really didn’t have the energy to do it.
More recently, it has dawned on me that what I have taken for Western culture per se has really been people’s reaction to me as a reflection of their identity in a negative sense. Perhaps it is the narcissism of small differences (a term coined by Freud). Certainly people have put their worst — narcissistic — foot forward in relation to me. The idea of the “white colonial” seems to produce a very powerful and maleficent aura. Nobody wants to be identified as one, especially in a country whose colonial experience has been so recent. At the same time, I think there is a certain envy and desire to have what one imagines that status involves.
Anyway, nobody wants to acknowledge these truths, and even suggesting that they are true has been enough to provoke attacks from unlikely quarters.
So. My work involves Asians instead.
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I didn’t know this about Harvard. It’s ridiculous, of course. But I have an idea why that happens. At Cornell, parents badger the teaching faculty with such intensity that a person who doesn’t want to invest their entire life into fighting them off find it easier to give in and just give any grade they want. I remember a student badgering me for over a month for giving him 96% and not a 100%
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Again, those helicopters…
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That boggles my mind – it’s policy at my university that academic evaluations are not subject to review. You can appeal on grounds of extenuating circumstance if you fail, but grades are not up for discussion.
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And if the teacher was wrong is his marking, what the student should do?
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You can raise a request to have your non-formative papers double marked, I believe through the grievance procedure, but I don’t know of anyone who has – primarily because undergrad papers are randomly double marked by senior lecturers anyway as part of career development of junior teaching staff. Formative papers are all anonymously marked & double marked – particularly those on grade boundaries. It’s just generally a cultural thing that grades are not generally up for dispute. In terms of random mistake, too, non formative papers are delivered with feedback so if the grade has mistakenly been set too low, as happened to one student my first semester – tutor typed 36 instead of 63, the feedback was sufficient for the mistake to be obvious.
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I have heard that exact statement from a TA before.
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I know many examples on both sides of this. I think I grade a bit harder, overall, than I did as a TA in the 1960’s. But I have colleagues who grade very hard. One rarely gives an A, even to advanced math majors. A few faculty in other departments will say that they just do not choose to ever use the A grade.
I did once, however, give a failing grade to a graduate student in another department when I was teaching a grad course while I was a TA. There was an emergency and no faculty member was available to teach this graduate course, so it was assigned to two TA’s for the two sections.
I have found, though, that the trend to being very specific on ones syllabus about what is required for each grade is causing some students to work extra hard to get an A, and others to give up and withdraw rather than get a failing grade.
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“A few faculty in other departments will say that they just do not choose to ever use the A grade.”
To not reward a great work is even more ludicrous than to not penalize a bad work.
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I just left a comment here that seems to have disappeared…
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Is this the “Anonymous” last comment?
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Yes, the second anonymous comment is mine. I don’t know why my browser deleted my information that has been populated here for ages.
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I have no idea! I’m sorry that happened. Sometimes WordPress acts up.
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““I never give As in my courses because nobody can know this material well enough to deserve an A!” ”
What kind of fucktard thinks (or stinks 😉 ) like this? I was never like that!
If nobody can know your material well enough to deserve an A+, you’re a bad teacher. But I have no problem at all if there’s only one student, though, because grade inflation is bad for students.
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