I'm in grad school at the same place I went to undergrad, and I was telling a recent seminar speaker over lunch that the divide between college and grad school seemed much more pronounced. Then again, I have no other basis for judgement.
However, my first teaching experience was in a class that I had taken my junior year of undergrad, and my GSI was one of my current advisor's former students. He seemed pretty relaxed about class policies, given that we didn't do anything stupid, like take naps or text people. I think one of the best parts about the class was that everyone who was registered actually wanted to be there, and nobody was in that "I need an easy lab course to cruise through my senior year" mindset, which made life easier for both the GSI and the students.
Unfortunately cases like that are pretty much utopia.
I ran into that GSI about a year later, and found out that he was teaching the same class again. When asked how teaching was going, he gave a different response: students had become whiners. Granted, it was a lab class that met for four hours on a stretch, and lab activities aren't always going to be fun and games, especially if grades (and possibility of future schooling) is at stake. The biggest problem is that most of the students WERE in the "I need an easy A to graduate" mindset, and as a result, procured mediocre work and less-than-stellar behavior.
So what changed? The undergraduate biology program here requires all students to have at least 2 lab classes picked from a specific list. This class wasn't on the list when I took it, and suddenly it was, resulting in an influx of students that may or may not (most likely the latter) have wanted to take the class to begin with. The class always counted toward a biology degree, but since it wasn't on that specific list of labs, most people overlooked it.
One of things I struggled with a lot during my year of teaching was a huge conflict of interest between me and the students, or me and the institution. I wanted to students to care about the material they were supposed to be learning, and I expected them to put in the effort to do well in the class because they chose to take it. On the flip side, most students wanted an easy A and do just enough to cruise by. I had one student turn in his Google search list about Compound X as his bibliography about how Compound X affected embryonic development. I emailed him and asked him to redo it, which he never did. Two weeks later, he came into office hours in a panic because he claimed that he was "snowboarding in Canada" that day and didn't get the email. And also, "can I still get credit if I redo it now?"
Seriously? Why even bother asking that question? The answer is obviously no.
***
I was having a discussion with one of my friends about institutions of higher learning; I was angry about our current system and how much grade inflation there was. I think bell curves can be pretty fair, but right now our bell curve has shifted so much to the right; the average, instead of being a B- or B like some of the classes I saw in undergrad, is now an B+ or even an A-. How are you supposed to differentiate between the average students and the outstanding students then?
On the flip side, instructors get in trouble with admin if their class averages are too low. My professor for Orgo II got fired after her term teaching us. Student evaluations aside, she had one test that was so difficult that the class average (for 1000+ students) was a 42%. So part of this huge grade inflation problem stems from instructors wanting a bit of job security... I understand that at least in part. However, things get out of hand when a student who clearly deserves a C- or a C ends up getting a B... just so we can move the class average up a few points and avoid getting in trouble by admin.
No instructor wants to reward mediocrity, but it ends up that way because students are the ones who are paying... and therefore the customers. So what do we do?
