Our lives are filled with measures of achievement. From cleaning
our rooms as children and taking a driver’s test as teenagers to
annual job reviews through the course of a career, there are
benchmarks of achievement that follow us through the entirety of
our lives. As we grow, these benchmarks become more
numerous and the stakes become higher.
Curiously, these benchmarks are being consistently eroded in
primary and secondary education, a stage of life when they should
be most emphasized. Standard benchmarks in educational
achievement are increasingly falling by the wayside and the
results are troubling.
George Leef with the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy
wrote of this problem at the college level, noting that more
college students today expect high grades for simply showing-up
in class or completing reading assignments. The New York
Times explored the issue as well, quoting college educators
bemoaning the fact that too many students are equating effort
with quality of work.
The origins of this sense of entitlement to good grades are not
difficult to trace. Students preparing for college now often find
themselves in classrooms where self esteem is valued more than
results. This mindset is perpetuated at the collegiate level as
institutions increasingly forsake legitimate measures of
scholarly merit in favor of unclear and shifting policies
designed to permit social engineering, both in terms of admission
to college and assessments of performance within it.
An illustration of this is seen in the relatively small but
growing number of colleges that have dropped standardized testing
as a requirement for admission in favor of “holistic” admission
practices.
Just last month, the University of California Board
of Regents voted to eliminate SAT Subject Tests as an admissions
requirement, opting instead for a costly “entitled to review”
system. The stated reason for dropping the tests: Some students
did not know they had to take them, thus creating a “barrier” to
admission.
Efforts to eliminate such standards in education come from
outside academia as well. Political activist groups like Fair
Test and others advocating the end of standardized testing for
college admission do so not for academic reasons but because
doing so meshes with the defined political agenda of liberal
control over academia. This is done by preaching to students and
educators about the false politics of entitlement over the
practical necessity of achievement. Test-optional policies
promoted by such groups serve no purpose other than to blur the
lines of scholarship while destroying empirical standards of
education and the definition of academic merit.
Wherever standards are destroyed and merit is redefined, a sense
of entitlement necessarily follows. This is true in any aspect of
society. In the field of education, it manifests itself in the
demand by students for high grades when they are not earned.
Aaron Brower, vice provost for teaching and learning at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, summed up the need for empirical
measures, telling the New York Times, “Unless teachers
are very intentional with our goals, we play into the system in
place.”
The same can be said of test optional admission policies at
America’s colleges. Presenting students with uncertain and
imprecise standards for admission plays into this growing sense
of entitlement. It stands to reason that, if the standards for
admission to college are subject to holistic whims, so too should
be the grades given to students. The end result is a workforce
that is less able to contribute to and compete in an increasingly
competitive global economy.
The American economy today is under stress because of a
recession. Recessions ebb and flow over time, but a failure to
provide the highest caliber education and demand excellence from
those who seek it poses a far larger threat. Students may receive
higher grades by simply demanding them, but America will not
succeed economically just because we want rewards without
results. It’s time to align our education priorities with
economic realities.
