Posted on 12/26/2024 4:35:42 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
After 20 years of teaching, I thought I’d heard every argument in the book from students who wanted a better grade. But recently, at the end of a weeklong course with a light workload, multiple students had a new complaint: “My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into this course.”
High marks are for excellence, not grit. In the past, students understood that hard work was not sufficient; an A required great work. Yet today, many students expect to be rewarded for the quantity of their effort rather than the quality of their knowledge. In surveys, two-thirds of college students say that “trying hard” should be a factor in their grades, and a third think they should get at least a B just for showing up at (most) classes.
This isn’t Gen Z’s fault. It’s the result of a misunderstanding about one of the most popular educational theories.
More than a generation ago, the psychologist Carol Dweck published groundbreaking experiments that changed how many parents and teachers talk to kids. Praising kids for their abilities undermined their resilience, making them more likely to get discouraged or give up when they encountered setbacks. They developed what came to be known as a fixed mind-set: They thought that success depended on innate talent and that they didn’t have the right stuff. To persist and learn in the face of challenges, kids needed to believe that skills are malleable. And the best way to nurture this growth mind-set was to shift from praising intelligence to praising effort.
The idea of lauding persistence quickly made its way into viral articles, best-selling books and popular TED talks...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Now I think there’s a Grit TV channel.
At our stamping plant, we had a maintenance tradesman who was a genius in fixing and building things, one was a conveyor belt.
So management decided to promote him to supervision. He lasted maybe 6 months because he couldn't do the scheduling or paper work required for the job.
People have different IQ levels? Wait, what . . .?
College students say that “trying hard” should be a factor in their grades.
Like staying awake through the entire class..................
Sometimes it’s so hard to let go of the apron strings.
Yes. I can do science, English & comprehension, history; no problem. I can understand physics and why things do what they do but don’t ask me to compute it!
Pretty much felt the same! I’ve got the basics down pat, no problem. Can do some basic trigonometry when needed. And then be never needed any of the higher level stuff for anything in my adult life. And I’ve worked in an electrical utility for the last 15 years, and manually computed mortar fire when our computers were down when I was in the Army. The vast majority of people don’t need it.
Yes. They basically want to be able to say that if someone persists through trying something (despite repeatedly not being successful) then that constitutes lots of “grit” points, so they also should get into schools and programs that others qualified for via actual success. So they made a scale, as people do who want to publish things, as they only do because that is what they are supposed to do, not out of real interest or a sense fore the actual utility of their publications.
I would honestly rather give 5 to 10% of admission approvals over to the “gut feel” of experienced faculty (including being good at knowing who the BS artists are, because there are a lot of them!) than to permit the redefining and repurposing of a word into a scale that is much more abusable than useful.
If there were like buttons on this thread I would click them for every comment.
Your link leads to a paywall, unfortunately.
Sounded like a good story.
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