Finals are over and some of my students are getting ready to walk across the stage during graduation this week. It’s pretty cool to say that I’ve now taught college graduates. However, with the end of the semester comes a bit of a pain in the ass. You see, I’m one of these professors that puts out a syllabus and then (gasp) sticks to it. In other words, when the syllabus says, “Cell phones use is not permitted in the classroom,” that means (get ready for it) that you can’t use your cell phone during class. Shocking, right? When I write that not participating in class discussions can negatively impact your class grade by dropping it more than a full letter grade, guess what that means?
That’s right! It means that if you opt to have a blank stare on your face during the entire semester then you get pretty close to 0 of the 25 points allocated for participation!
Let’s face it – many of today’s college students were whisked through high school and really not properly prepared for the rigor of college-level study. To make matters worse, these students were typically pampered all of their lives by hyper-protective parents, teachers that opted to teach plain vanilla course content as opposed to creating an engaging classroom, and an overall failing educational system that doesn’t mind giving students a higher grade for their “effort.”
That crap doesn’t fly in the real world. If you miss a deadline for your company or submit work that is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, you get fired. Period.
You might say that if it is the job of the secondary education system to prepare students for the rigor of college study, then it is the job of the college system to prepare students for the rigor of higher level occupations. That’s my job as an adjunct professor. In fact, I believe that my job as an adjunct professor is to bring outside experience into the classroom and show my students what happens in the real world through the scope of the course that I’m teaching. It’s a tricky game, but I enjoy doing this type of work because I see the quality of students coming out of most colleges and they’re just not prepared to be engaged employees. It’s a damn shame, really.
To some degree, I think that for most students I unwillingly represent the exact opposite of what they’re used to from their high school teachers. I stress “unwillingly” because I don’t think that I’m doing anything outlandish or crazy in my grading. I think that when a student does not engage herself in class discussion because she is clacking away on her BlackBerry device for the majority of the semester in a class that places 25% of the final grade on participation, then the best that student can hope for is a 75 in the class. Okay, maybe if she engages in a few discussions throughout the semester, she can find herself with a 78 or 79.
Too often, the pampered generation of students expects that if they receive a B average on their written submissions and have spotty attendance and no participation, then they’ll just get the B average. I’m not sure on what planet that would make sense, but it doesn’t work in my classroom. I create a grading matrix in an Excel spreadsheet and detail for each student how they can receive an A in the course. In fact, I give them a copy of the spreadsheet so they can track their grades throughout the semester. I also suggest to the students when/if they need to be more engaged in class discussions so they can get some participation points. There’s not much more that I can do to help these students other than resemble some of their pampering high school teachers and I’m not interested in that at all.
Thus far, about 15% of my students have questioned their final grade and I’ve suggested that they lacked on the participation requirement. None of the questioning students have responded to my replies on their participation, but I expect that in a generation that has rarely been told, “no,” or “bad job,” that a few of them will lash out at my responses. Unfortunately for them, I don’t have to worry about getting tenure or receiving any type of accolades from my students since I’m given teaching assignments when/if the college needs help.
If you’re a college student out there contemplating complaining about your final grade, I would suggest that you get out your syllabus and look at how your grade is calculated. If participation is 15% of your final grade, then ask yourself if you participated in each class session. If not, then do you think that you deserve those 15 points? If you answer, “yes,” to that question, then you’re probably the result of a pampering system that doesn’t teach you in the context of the real world. If you answered, “no,” to that question, they you probably wouldn’t complain about your final grade anyway.
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