Solveig Lucia Gold and Joshua T. Katz:
‘You’re really smart. What the hell is wrong with you?” Yale English Prof. Lawrence Rainey asked one of us (Mr. Katz) over a beer-stained table at a local pizzeria after grading his first college paper in 1987.
The grade in question was a C-plus, the same grade that Ms. Gold received on her first college paper, at Princeton in 2013. We had each arrived at college thinking we were hot stuff: straight-A students from private schools in New York. We were quickly knocked down a peg.
This formative moment would be nearly unimaginable today. At Yale, some 80% of undergraduate course grades are A or A-minus. Harvard’s statistics are about the same. Princeton held out for a while, but since it abandoned its policy of capping the percentage of A-range grades in 2014, grade-point averages have soared. Grade inflation isn’t limited to the Ivy League: GPAs have been rising nationwide for decades. Skyrocketing tuition has turned students into paying customers who expect to be praised, not challenged.
This fall, as professors sit down to grade their students’ first papers, we urge: Challenge your students. Don’t worry about being liked. Worry about being respected.
Students will respect you if you respect them by being honest about the quality of their work and taking the time to help them do better. Often you and they are both fully aware that they haven’t really tried. Make them want to try. You never know the difference your feedback could make. Our C-plus papers were both about Homer, and we went on to become classicists. Would this have happened if our professors had let us coast on unearned confidence?