Just for Showing Up: Consolation Prize

It is becoming increasingly common for young people to win prizes in many contests just for participating.  It is true that very young folks feel awfully disappointed if they win nothing at all, e.g. at a Halloween costume competition, and so there are consolation prizes.  But it used to be only for tiny kids, say under the age of four, that these consolation prizes were factored into the design of the competition.  But today, even college kids, and even adults feel entitled to something for just showing up.

gradeinflation.com

One of my pet peeves is that students sometimes take one of my courses and expect to earn a grade of C just for attending.  There are other grades, they forget, e.g. F.  To my indignation, some faculty frown upon colleagues who grade too rigorously.  Giving too many Fs, apparently, is an indication of inflexibility.  Colleagues: it is easy to give everyone a passing grade.  It is good for the school (one criterion of the quality of a school, especially for marketing purposes, is the expected number of years a typical student will have to spend in order to graduate--the fewer the better), good for the professor (at least in some schools; in others, an inflated grade distribution is probably not considered to be ideal), and good for students who just don't have time for classes.

Some cynics, of course, try to tie in this expectation of a Gentleman's B (I know; it used to be a Gentleman's C, but grade inflation has taken place) with other entitlements.  An entitlement is an unearned, but expected, benefit, and usually refers to an impoverished member of society who is perceived as not sufficiently exerting him or herself.  Those who collect Food Stamps, for instance, are viewed by some as being encouraged to continue to be unproductive.  A lot of fiscal conservatives take on the mindset of business executives, and judge how deserving underprivileged citizens are from the point of view of whether they benefit the economy.  It has suited those who consider that all governance should be modeled on business management to judge the value of things on their utility to the "company", or the nation.  I am not able to support my conviction that this is not appropriate in making socio-political decisions, but all those who argue against a single-payer health care system, for instance, feel that it is better to allow the health insurance industry their healthy profits than to enable the poorest and most vulnerable among us better health care (at the cost of the taxpayer).  In addition, this sort of fiscal conservative views government bureaucracy with grave disapproval, and they anticipate that the bureaucracy that would go with a single payer system will be enormous, and not surprisingly.  So: no government health care just for showing up.  (Unless you're a congressman.)

I wonder how these same fiscal conservatives would react if their children were not given passing grades just for showing up!  They figure that they are the customers, and they deserve a good grade because they pay the fees.

Part of the problem is that the present-day transactional approach to education is based on the belief that the teacher must do all the work, and the student only needs to be a passive recipient of the lesson or the course or whatever.  If the student does not succeed, the perception is that the teacher is to blame.

In the earliest grades, we must grant, the teacher has a greater share of the responsibility.  On the other hand, in the earliest grades, the students are so diverse in their readiness to learn that the teacher can only do so much.  In later grades, the students tend to be organized in cohorts where students of similar levels of advancement are in class together, and they can all be expected to absorb the material at the same rate, more or less.  But some are more motivated than others, yet they expect the same grades, and many are disappointed.  This is where the "consolation prize" concept comes in.

There is no resolution to this sort of expectation.  Teachers will increasingly take the easy way out, and give out higher grades just to avoid the annoyance of arguments with students (and their parents).  In the short run, these higher grades will make the customers happy.  But one wonders what will be the implications in the long run.

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