A recent New York Times article (“Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes”) reports that “a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.” This sounds crazy of course.

However, upon a more detailed inspection of this article, I’m finding that the results may not show what the reporter (and maybe researchers) implies they’re showing. Students taking these surveys could have just meant that they expect that a normal student should be able to achieve that sort of grade by doing that amount of work (not necessarily if they did that work alone and performed horribly on the assignments). But, I don’t know, maybe they really did mean the stronger thing. Students do tend to have odd views about how they should be graded.

Trackback URL