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Rude undergraduates

Brian Leiter

This story is pretty wild–is this typical these days?  (I generally teach only JD and PhD students, so I really don't know–though the undergrads I've had in classes have been nothing like what's described.)  For those in teaching for a long time, have you noticed a change?  I guess it wouldn't be entirely surprising, given the degradation of discourse in cyberspace and so much trash TV sitcoms organized around jackass behavior which is supposed to be funny.  Perspectives from readers, both in the US and elsewhere, on this issue?

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39 responses to “Rude undergraduates”

  1. Jay

    I think the explanation for this that I've heard is that when college costs tens of thousands of dollars per year, students and parents begin to view it as an entitlement that they are purchasing. And if you're paying $45,000/year for a particular entitlement, you are extremely interested in feeling like you're getting your money's worth.

    Reply
  2. T C

    Students are now to be thought of as 'customers': this is the root of the problem (view from Scotland).

    Reply
  3. Anon Grad Student

    I finished my undergraduate studies last year, so while I can't offer the perspective of a professor, I still think I can shed some light on the situation. I know people who have developed the attitudes that I'm about to describe, and it frustrates me to no end. I think there are three main problems. The first stems from the increasing perception of a college degree as a product to be purchased rather than a qualification to be earned (which is itself a further manifestation of the marketization of everything). I know students who think that they deserve at least a C in each class simply in virtue of the fact that they are paying for their education. They think that they are paying for a degree rather than paying for the opportunity to pursue a degree. The second (related) problem is that many students feel that if they are performing poorly, it is reflection of the quality of the teacher rather than the quality of the student. Thus, students often blame teachers for their own poor performance. I think that this is a psychological defense mechanism against the increasing competition for jobs, spots in graduate or professional school, etc. A student has to rationalize his/her shortcomings in order to maintain the belief that he/she has the capability of staying on his/her proposed career path. (And blaming oneself for one's problems is very difficult for many people in my generation). Finally, the state of public primary and secondary education is often so poor that students come to college without any preparation for the demands of college courses. Students come to college without the ability to write coherent English, much less a coherent essay. So, they do not understand that their performance on, say, an essay was poor because it would have been adequate at their (poor) high school.

    The first two are, of course, ludicrous. Students are not paying for degrees, and 99% of the time, the student deserves the grade that he/she received. However, college prep is a significant issue that needs to be tackled. But the fact that a student is behind is no justification for disrespecting a professor.

    Reply
  4. John

    Anon Grad Student's observations are spot-on, but surely grade inflation is also a relevant consideration, together with the shocking number of courses in which students can get by without doing the assigned readings or taking the time to revise their papers, and with little creativity or serious critical thought. This makes it seem to them like we philosophers (and others who try to buck these trends) are failing to observe the norms of the contemporary academy, as indeed in some sense we are.

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  5. J

    I've seen identical behavior in institutions where students pay six thousand a year. Perhaps these students still feel like this is a lot, and feel entitled for that reason, but I suspect the problem has numerous cultural explanations; that self-entitlement doesn't neatly track high tuition rates.

    Reply
  6. Joseph G.

    Some students are simply unpleasant people – the rule that you'll find bullies everywhere applies here as much as anywhere. I know of a student who threw a tantrum in a seminar because he was shown to be wrong, to the point of kicking a chair over and screaming swearwords. That incident seems to be more related to a deep psychological problem than this one, but I doubt they are totally unconnected.

    Reply
  7. Another Anon Grad Student

    With regard to AGS's final point, when I taught for the first time last year (at an American public university in the Leiter top 20 of philosophy departments) I ran into this frequently – essays by intelligent but lazy students that would have received an A in high school, largely because of the student's felicity with the language, but got a B- or C+ in my class because they contained no substantive engagement with the subject matter. Perhaps two-thirds of my remedial contact with students involved explaining what I meant by "substantive engagement", and it was a struggle to get this concept across to them. They viewed essays as exercises intended to demonstrate a) that they had done the reading/attended the lectures, and b) that they could string words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays.

    I did once have direct rudeness – a student e-mailed me asking me to reconsider his final grade. I looked back over his work, consulting with the professor I was TAing for, and decided that he deserved his grade. I e-mailed him explaining that he had never fixed the problems I had outlined for him midway through the semester, and I couldn't fix his grade. I got an abusive e-mail back from him accusing me of ruining his chances of getting into business school (may have done him a favour, there) and of ruining philosophy for him; it also contained sarcastic well-wishes for my future as a professor.

    Reply
  8. Matt

    Students *are* customers; many are just confused about what they're buying. What they're buying when they enroll in a college or university is akin to what they get if they purchase a gym membership: a place with resources to help them develop *if* they put in the time and effort to do so. No more than they can get fit just by joining a gym can they get an education just by paying tuition. Many need to have this made clear to them. (I've found on occasion that the gym membership analogy actually helps.)

    As far as the disrespect goes, I haven't noticed a big shift in the 10-15 years I've been in the classroom (as grad student instructor and professor). I do think there is a general cultural shift towards informality (e.g., young kids now call parents and teachers by first names), much of which is related to and exacerbated by current technological forms of communication and exchange. It's easy to mistake some of this for rudeness and disrespect if you didn't grow up with it (I'm on the cusp and see a difference among those just 2-3 years younger than I am [38], who seem less bothered by the informality). The linked-to example is clearly over the top, but doesn't strike me as really representative.

    Still, this is an empirical matter! What do the sociologists say?

    Reply
  9. John Collins

    Matt, the gym membership analogy is helpful, but there is a disanalogy: most students' education costs are subsidized quite a bit by taxpayers, alumni donations and other sources, while gym memberships are not. I don't think most students realize this is true, and if they did they might recognize that they are being invested in as much as they are investing.

    Reply
  10. Ivan Kelly

    I am retiring soon and have taught university students for 35 years. I agree with the comments above but have a further one to add. When I started and up until computers and power-point were available our only method of instruction was lecture, with contributions from students in discussions. With the entering of powerpoints and white boards, students write down far less and can access the course bulletin board for lectures, readings, and powerpoints, meaning fewer students attend classes. Grade inflation is a real problem, I hate to point this out, but in our college about 90% of students get degrees with distinction and are VERY upset if they get a low mark. They all seem to consider themselves in the superior range.

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  11. Anonymous

    What about the shocking possibility that, on occasion, the professor could have done more? I cannot speak to the particularities of this case but I assume that for most professors, relationships with students are merely transactional. Students hand in assignments, professors grade, and so on.

    As difficult as it might be given how busy everyone is, forging relationships that are more than just transactional might be the key in cases like this. Maybe the student has pressures of which one is not aware? Maybe life is tough for them? Maybe if we related to them on a deeper personal level, instead of just presupposing that they're entitled brats, such occurrences could be minimized?

    Reply
  12. College Grad

    I'd like to second Anonymous 11:30. I am too young to comment on a historical trajectory, but it seems to me as a relatively recent graduate from a very well esteemed American college that the problem, at least today, runs both ways–students' rudeness is often matched, and in many cases in part learned from, that of their professors. Most of my courses in college were philosophy classes in which the only mode of evaluation was the submission of one or two papers. In less than half of these courses did I get unsolicited feedback on my written work–EVER. In most of these cases I was able to get feedback on my work by scheduling meetings with professors, but the onus was on me, and this for an extremely low threshold of pedagogical engagement: I was not looking for someone to help me through a paper-writing process (god forbid), but merely for comments on my final paper (comments which, in theory at least, motivated the grade on my transcript). In one case, after six months of extremely polite email correspondence (polite on my part–most of it went unanswered), I finally managed to get a meeting with the professor of a class to talk about my final paper (the only required work for the class), for which I had never received comments (but had received a mediocre grade). My goal was not to have the grade changed, but the professor took an extremely defensive attitude from the outset, apparently assuming that I was there to challenge her 'authority', when all I was asking for was well reasoned criticism of my paper (which, incidentally, I never got: the meeting clearly evidenced that the professor had only ever skimmed my paper, a fact which, compounded with native philosophical mediocrity, made for a scattered, incoherent set of comments that didn't add up to anything plausibly describable as 'criticism'). I was, I think, polite to the professor throughout, even writing a thank-you note afterwards for the meeting (no response). But the lesson was clear: that, being an undergrad in a high-flying research institution, many professors approached their pedagogical relationship to me with insouciance bordering on contempt.

    My point is that students learn the kind of rudeness accounted in the original post from somewhere, and, in some cases at least, they learn it from professors. I hope my experience was deviant from the norm in higher ed, but I do not think it was, entirely. I take it that the problem is largely structural, as above comments have noted, but that professors are generally not blameless observers of the situation but part of the same culpably disfunctional pedagogical system as the students in question.

    Reply
  13. Ram Neta

    I teach a course with an enrollment of 220 students nearly every semester, and I find nothing unusual about the story that provoked this comment thread: I encounter this behavior from several students every semester. What is unusual is Anonymous's proposal that professors like me develop closer relationships with each of my 220 students each semester, along with doing all my committee work, teaching my other courses, supervising undergraduate honors theses, master's theses and doctoral dissertations, remaining research active, etc. I do not assume that all my complaining students are entitled brats, but I do assume that any student who is going to challenge the grade they get simply by showing me their report card, without arguing for the merits of their work in this particular course, is an entitled brat. (Why else would they be showing me their report card if it weren't intended to serve as a yardstick of what they're "entitled" to?)

    I've come up with two measures to reduce the incidence of this kind of behavior among students: (1) insure that all papers are graded blind (students put only their unmemorable ID numbers, not their names, on their papers), and (2) assign grades that are explicitly ordinal (e.g., instead of "A", "B", "C", etc., papers are graded in terms equivalent to "top 10%", "next 10%", etc.) Points are not converted to letter grades until the end of the semester, and if students complain about their letter grades, I ask them if they can point to an error in the arithmetic. If they cannot, and if they also are not willing to show me errors that were made in the grading of one of their papers, I do not engage further, but encourage them to submit their complaints to my department chair. I have been grateful to learn that this has not created much extra work for my already overworked chair.

    Reply
  14. Matthew an undergrad

    I'd just like to say we're not all like this, and many of my fellow undergrad students I've come into contact with are not like this either. However, I have noticed people getting grades back on tests, essays, etc. and getting very angry. Whenever I get back a poor grade I immediately look over my work and/or talk to my professor about how to improve/what I did wrong. There may be some anger there, but nothing like the anger I see in other students at times. I believe someone above recognized that so many students believe that poor grading is the fault of the teacher. This could be attributed to the fact that so many studies in education in America looks at teachers performance rather than student performance. It may also be partly due to the study that shows people with less intellectual sophistication can't tell when someone is more intellectually sophisticated than them, so they don't recognize the things they did wrong as being "wrong." To such students it may seem as preference rather than rightness. I've had many students tell me a specific professor is bad because if you don't agree with them, you fail. After ignoring this advice I tend to notice the professor is extremely competent in her/his field and the student must have been completely off base with the topics at hand to believe it was a mere matter of preference.

    Reply
  15. Anonymous 2

    I've taught undergraduates both in Canada and the UK, so I might have some interesting data to add, which appear to be evidence against some of the explanations offered here. Canada and the UK have [or had, until now] comparable tuition rates which are about a tenth of the $45,000/year reported in comment #1 for the US. Yet, in my experience, the kind of rude behavior described in the original post is very common among Canadian undergraduates — in every course I taught or TAd there, I had multiple complaints about grades, most of them not very polite, and at least 1-2 students sending abusive emails each term. (E.g., one student who failed intro logic sent me a whole string of angry emails denouncing me and all of academic philosophy in some very colorful language. Another student, who had failed to turn in previous assignments on time, sent me multiple emails the day before the final assignment was due, giving me her cell phone number and insisting that I call her to explain the assignment. When I politely declined, saying that this is what office hours are for, she turned abusive.) In the UK, on the other hand, I've never gotten a complaint about a grade. Others I know who teach British undergraduates have reported getting complaints, but I've never heard of students here being rude to instructors they way that I witnessed, over and over again, on the other side of the Atlantic. I have no idea what might explain this difference.

    Reply
  16. Kris Kemtrup

    Based wholly on anecdotal evidence, I'd say students are, at least more often than you'd expect, noticeably rude when you interact with them via email. However, even those students are very polite in person. (This is one reason that I have a fairly strong "no email" policy, which has made life so much better for my students and me.) I thereby conclude, with my scanty evidence, that there is a generational gap regarding what is considered rude in email and interent correspondence.

    Also, some of the worst cases of apparent rudeness, in my experience, are instances of mental illnesses poking their head out. That's something to keep in mind when your students bother you.

    Reply
  17. Anonymous Undergraduate

    Coming purely from personal experience, I've noticed that some of my fellow undergrads that are similar to the one the link discusses aren't interested in the material or field itself, whatever field it may be. Many of the students at my school take intro level philosophy classes because they think it's an easy grade. If that "easy grade" does not turn out to be an A/A-/B+ they then proceed have a fit. Also, to put it bluntly, I see a large number of philosophy majors in the department on the pre-law track, using the major as a tool for the LSATs and a high GPA. If their grades aren't acceptable to them, they don't care how inappropriate they act to the professor. It's quite sad that a university level education comes to resorting to behavior like that sometimes.

    Reply
  18. Anonymous

    @Ram Neta: my words were "forging relationships that are more than just transactional might be the key in cases like this."

    In cases like this.

    Reply
  19. Stan Slater

    College grad (from June 11th at 12:19 pm) seems to pick up that the problem is rooted in both the teacher and the student. Research based teachers seem to consider teaching (at least undergraduates) with little priority. I would like to point to Rem Nata's post as an example of such. While there maybe a choice by the teacher to take up more responsibilities, such as research or committees, there will be a lack of time and probably effort to properly/thoroughly engage the students on a individual basis.

    For example on the original blog post "The Philosophy Smoker" the teacher gave more passive feedback in the form of written/editorial remarks. This can be helpful. But what if the teacher where able to review the critical thinking process with the student? Or have a TA do this? Would this have avoided the student repeatedly making the same error? Examples would be developing thesis statements, exegesis, or other aspects. I would guess that the probability of student error is reduced after the lesson. This is very time consuming I understand and isn't totally feasible. And with a rude student you may not want to spend the time with them.

    Now bringing up the students role seems to be much harder to 'pin down'. But I think we have clearly pointed to the fact that degrees now are treated as a commodity. This leads obviously to a poor teacher-student relationship. But I have worked in departments and found that students generally now have very little understanding of social rules and humility. The rate of this in the student body seems to be very high at least in my experience. Both secretaries and teachers are treated as means to a degree, not as as instructors. In the students view the professor are service providers, hence most of the rudeness. This would most likely explain when a student point to all of there 'A' grades, they assume that you will simply provide the means to similar mark. Philosophy is not interested in this most of the time and hopefully at the very least provides rigorous thinking for the mind which seems to be contrary to the students interest if they are in school to buy a degree.

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  20. Aaron Preston

    "Still, this is an empirical matter! What do the sociologists say?"

    There are some social psychologists who have argued that there is indeed an empirically verifiable, generational trend in the direction of the sorts of traits and behaviors this student exhibited. See: http://www.narcissismepidemic.com/

    Reply
  21. Carl

    Based on my experiences, I didn't find the original story at all surprising. That said, I was surprised last year when I taught for the first time in the South, that students here are a lot more polite, even when they get bad grades, than in the Northeast or Upper Midwest. I'm not sure how much I can generalize from one year down here versus something like 10 up north. . . .

    I'll also add that a lot of student complaints can be avoided by managing expectations during the term: give students the rubric you'll use, explain clearly what you're looking for, give them examples from previous years, etc. Student complaints come from all sources: feelings of entitlement, previous teachers just passing them through for any work, mental problems, signs from their professor that they view as disrespecting to them, and professors not making an effort to teach well (beyond making a performance of lecture).

    Reply
  22. Undergrad Philosophy Student

    As a current undergrad I can attest to the prevalence of above described attitudes, but I would just like to add two thoughts.

    Typically when I witness my peers throw mini-tantrums in response to grades the reaction is only a temporary emotional outburst (likely a combination of dread and outrage regarding the grade's perceived impact on their planned futures). When given some time to ruminate on the issue at hand they often feel (correctly) some embarrassment at their behavior and accompanying denouncements of teachers, etc. Unfortunately, in two cases I know of this rumination came only after an angry email had been sent out. I think it might take a day or two of calming down before one realizes how to appropriately deal with disappointment for many, but I guess the sweet emotional release of a rant can be too hard to pass up — perhaps this fact reflect some psychological affects of the helicopter parenting and instant gratification culture older generations sometimes associate with mine?

    And as a student who usually reaches out to professors after receiving imperfect marks (even A-'s, yes, when I am unclear on comments etc.), I find that the prevalence of ill-mannered complainers has caused some dread in me when writing up an email or approaching a professor after class. I know what a request to discuss a past paper's grade can look like to a professor: another brat looking to complain. As a result, I've often had to measure my tone very carefully or even explicitly say "I'm not looking to change or debate my grade; I would just like some clarification and tips on how to improve in the future." In a word, I think the attitudes covered in the topic at hand have a toxic influence for both teachers and students, a lamentable case to me. I hope to become a professor myself one day and I know that I will have very little tolerance for any such garbage.

    Reply
  23. recent ugrad, now grad

    incompetent graduate students are typically behind student complaints– this means leading undergrads astray in instruction, poor paper advice ('that sounds interesting'–no wonder, everything sounds interesting to a grad student!), and even worse paper grading. Professors then are unwilling to take complaints seriously because of some actually lazy and entitled students, but let's not just assume the problem is uni-directional.

    Reply
  24. C. Kemp

    I want to second Ram Neta's approach to the assignment of grades, and add that in response to this trajectory, whatever it is or whatever its causes, I have over 15 years worked on a grading scheme that breaks out student responsibility for individual components in a way that lets students know *very* early in the semester how they're going to do in the class, and that makes almost all of my responses to complaints about grades (I get very few) take the form of 'check the math'. I have apparently created at least the feeling, if not most of the time the fact, of a mechanical dimension to earning grades in my courses. They don't fight the mechanics. They push when they think something's negotiable, so nothing is negotiable. I also start with a no late work/no make-up assignments policy in big bold letters, and put exceptions (comas, childbirth) in fine print at the end of the syllabus. I give absolute reasons in categorical terms for all course procedures, presented as fiats by me–no nuances. Philosophy stops with the substance. Tone really matters–to get the right feel, I recommend reading Judith Martin (Miss Manners) on any subject–just the right combination of cheerful and adamantine.

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  25. Ben

    For what it's worth, my sense is that students assume that the default is an A, and the burden is on the instructor to explain how they "lost points." It doesn't occur to them that the default might be an F, and the burden is on them to explain how they earned points.

    And just to change things up a bit: a student in an honors course once sent me an email asking why he got an A- rather than an A for the course; I wrote one or two paragraphs back explaining what was wrong with his final paper; and — to my surprise — he wrote me an extremely thankful email back. Apparently all he needed was something to keep his pushy parents off his back.

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  26. Eli Weber

    I find it a little troubling that several people have described what sounds like a very hard-line, impersonal, "mechanical" approach to dealing with these sorts of issues. My experience, in both teaching and in my prior work as a case manager and conflict resolution mediator, is that most people with a complaint are primarily interested in having someone listen to their perspective, rather than having their adversary make the case against them. Frankly, challenging the legitimacy of their viewpoint is the last thing you should do with someone who is upset and disagrees with you. If you give someone a few moments to vent, you can often have a reasonable conversation from there. But if you shut down communication before this happens, you can expect some anger in response.

    One thing that I try to do in my courses, from the outset, is make it clear that my students can talk to me. While I'm very upfront that I have certain expectations, and that certain conduct is simply not appropriate, I try to convey an appreciation of the fact that my class is not the only one they are taking, and that they may have a lot going on in their lives, just like I do. One doesn't need to become buddies with everyone in a class of 200, but surely it's not much extra work to just be approachable. I think that some of the tantrums people may experience are a consequence of shutting down lines of communication pre-emptively. Just because a student can't identify what's wrong with their paper doesn't mean they are just whining about their grade–they have to be taught about what makes a good paper, and for some students, this means working through it on an individual basis. That's what office hours are for. By defaulting to a position where the student is expected to make her case, I think we are putting students into a defensive posture that's really counter-productive for everyone involved.

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  27. another beginning graduate student

    As a writing tutor for an intro-level class, I once spent a couple hours more or less pinned to a chair by a freshman who insisted that she didn't get *Bs* and that we go over her first draft (which had received a B, with an opportunity for revision) line by line. (Of course the problem wasn't in any of the lines, it was that they didn't lead anywhere, much less anywhere interesting!) I wonder how many limbs I would have kept had she gotten a C or lower.

    Most teachers and authority figures in American, at least, society these days don't seem to feel comfortable or right distinguishing genuinely intelligent thought from polish and/or "perspective" (and of course everyone's perspective is equally valid, so why would anyone get a grade that's not an A?). Or maybe it's that they're not capable. But it seems to me that high school and in many departments early undergraduate education are approached in this mold. And how could anyone doubt its efficacy, when they see the kind of people who write bestsellers or New York Times editorials or appear on talk shows or political combat shows, for lack of a better phrase, these days? Surely the most convenient route to gaining power, recognition, and a voice is complete submission to the Dunning-Kruger effect. By the way, I've seen very little evidence that philosophy departments are somehow immune to this trend, especially in areas where manipulation of symbols or jargon is highly prized.

    I do want to offer a little bit of resistance to the idea that this is mainly a generational problem with the students, though. The "narcissism epidemic", if it exists, seems to me to be something far more widespread (look at politics, for instance; it's not youth entitlement that's organizing discourse for the next election…). I don't know anything about the empirical work on the subject, though. Also, given the ever-increasing online supply of free educational material, bromides about paying for the opportunity rather than the degree might be worth reconsidering.

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  28. Eric

    While I agree with Eli Weber that the purely mechanical approach is often the cause of friction between students and instructors, the hazard of having very open lines of communication is that students who take advantage of the openness will assume that, by coming to talk about work, they will receive a better grade, which isn't necessarily the case. As with the post at 9:04 AM, I have had students want to work over essays with little-to-no promise and still be gobsmacked by the lack of the assumed "A" grade. I have had well-meaning students ask me, when I point out that the main thing missing in their paper is a GOOD ARGUMENT, if I can supply the argument for them.

    While I'm not sure if this is purely a generational thing, the entitlement seems real. And part of that reality is the fact that high school students are told (roughly) that they have a right to a college education. They read into that claim that they have a right to DO WELL in college. To borrow Matt's analogy…you can't blame the gym that you don't attend when you don't suddenly develop washboard abs.

    There are students who are simply not ready for college. Some need more maturity, and some may never have the intellectual faculties or personal discipline to succeed on their own. Those, in my estimation, are the ones who scream loudest about their own failings.

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  29. Eli Weber

    I totally agree with Eric's point that there is some hazard associated with open-lines of communication. I am by no means suggesting that open communication eliminates this problem of entitlement, only that it's preferrable to the hard-line approach some people here are advocating. Some students, just like some adults, will try to take advantage of whatever is available to them. But if it's up to me, I'd much rather have students come talk to me, and be surprised and disappointed that I'm not willing to reward this behavior or do their work for them. Even if this happens, it's only a surprise the first time. We aren't going to eliminate all unpleasantness from these sorts of exchanges with students, so we shouldn't try, but we can minimize it and make it more productive for everyone. The point of keeping communication more open, in my view, is to get students in front of you and having a two-way conversation. Not only does this open the door for the possibility of learning, it also makes it less likely that we will be subjected to the extreme tantrum. Electronic communication allows for a level of boldness that few students will demonstrate in person.

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  30. Geoff

    This is an interesting discussion. The issue of shameless grade grubbing should be distinguished from rudeness, I think — in my experience the worst cases of the former have been very polite, it's like they're running plays from How To Win Friends And Influence People.

    In graduate school I was a TA a couple of times for Shelly Kagan, who despite being a legendarily "hard grader" is one of the most popular professors at Yale. You want undergraduates who think they're entitled to A's? Yale has them. Anyway at the beginning of the semester he would read the definitions of the letter grades from the Yale catalog, which says that A means "excellent", B means "good", and C means "satisfactory". Then (at least this is how I remember it) he tells them that "good" means *good*, and that they should be very proud of doing good work in his class.

    I've stolen this — my institution has similar definitions of the letter grades in the catalog. C means "satisfactory competence", B means "above satisfactory competence", and A means "outstanding competence"; I quote these definitions on every syllabus. So competently satisfying all of the course requirements earns you a C. I refer to the definitions when giving comments on written work and talking with students who are unhappy with their grades. I've found it to be a very nice framework for lots of reasons, and it's really nice to be able to justify it by pointing out that it's just the institutional policy.

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  31. David

    Ben makes a good point about how American undergrads tend to assume that they "start" with an A and lose points from there. In fact, the way I was evaluated as an American high-school student the implication was often that I started with the maximum grade. On math and science exams my teachers would mark up incorrect answers while leaving correct answers alone. History and English teachers were much more likely to comment on what I did wrong in my papers than what I did right. One history teacher of mine used to always say that if we didn't have "topic sentences" in the essays we wrote on tests, we "started with a C." In preparation for International Baccalaureate examinations, all of my teachers admonished my classmates and me not to "lose points" by making various errors. So until I read Ben's post it had never occurred to me that college professors make have a different grading philosophy to what I'm used to. I wonder if other undergraduates have made a similar assumption regarding the similarity between high-school and college evaluation.

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  32. Tim Maudlin

    The question of the "default grade" is perhaps worth reiterating. Typically, when I give an exam I start by contrasting two approaches to grading: the idea (which students sometime have) that before I have even opened their exam to look at it they have an A and that I have to justify any points taken off from that vs. the idea (which is obviously correct) that before I have opened the exam they have a zero and have to work their way up from that. This is meant to encourage them not to adopt a defensive strategy (I don't want to write something that can be faulted, so I will write as little as possible) but rather to think of the exam as an opportunity to show off everything they have learned. This puts them in the right frame of mind to take the exam and may lower their expectations. and hence complaints.

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  33. SM (postgraduate)

    I recently completed my undergraduate degree at a state university in the US. It's probably true that I am not speaking for the majority here, but as a undergraduate philosophy student, I never once encountered rudeness from my professors. Their doors were always open, they were all prompt at responding to e-mails and more importantly, they encouraged students to visit during office hours. As a result, very rarely was I enrolled in a class in which students were disrespectful to the professors. I of course, don't know what it was like on the inside, i.e. whether professors received harsh e-mails, etc.

    I mention this brief history of my college experience as a student studying philosophy only to note that when students and professors interact in such a way, it seems unlikely for a poor relationship to develop. This is probably different for some one teaching large lectures, where it is too onerous a task for the instructor to engage in conversations beyond the classroom with every student.

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  34. Dennis

    In my case (teaching 7 years total, undergraduates), I have encountered both rude students and rude parents. Especially when I had to deal with plagiarists.
    I have found that the sense of entitlement is reinforced by parents. Especially those who leave their sons and daughters to their own devices and think that giving their kids all the comforts money can buy will somehow make up for their own shortcomings. In order to afford these comforts and school, many of the parents have been working in countries like the U.S. for many years.
    It also does not help when those who should support faculty are not as supportive as they should be.
    I also have to think of the age factor, many of our first year students are quite young. But age was not so much of a problem before.

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  35. Jamie Dreier

    I wonder if commenter pool on this thread is biased toward those who have had particularly bad experiences.

    I have hardly ever encountered a really rude student — in fact, I can't think of a single encounter in my 24 years of teaching, at a university where you might expect the students to have an 'entitled' attitude. I very occasionally get students coming in to talk about their grades, but even when they do it isn't complaining so much as puzzlement (grade inflation is high here so many students expect to get As if they do all the work).

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  36. Kathryn J. Norlock

    What interesting ideas in this thread, I may borrow some. My students tend to look surprised, but appreciative, when I announce a paper assignment and then tell them, cheerfully enough, "Right now, you are all getting zeros." In every course, I then explain that in composition, they build a case for more than a zero, and with every paragraph, citation, and move of argumentation, their grade improves. This has been very helpful in ensuring that we share a cultural script, one in which none of them have good grades until they do some good work.

    Of course, lovely as most students are, this only works on those who show up. When I read the o.p. at the Smoker, I get the impression that the student in the anecdote may not have attended or engaged. Witness the passage, "Anyways, I wrote back with a set of detailed explanations of the grading of her various assignments–her work suffered from the same set of problems all semester. She didn't listen when I had explained what I was looking for, and kept making the same mistakes. She replied a day or two later with an iPhone screenshot of her report card [saying] how much more valuable to society than philosophy her major subject is…" Anyone who doesn't change their mistakes in subsequent work is probably not reading feedback, and sometimes, though not always, students utterly non-responsive to feedback are those who do not much care about the class or the quality of their work in it. Even on this occasion of the reiterated feedback, she didn't respond to it. At such times, courses and professors are mere means, obstacles to be got around.

    I appreciate the contributions of undergraduates who've written in to this discussion. I don't think you're all alike, and I don't think most students are like the one in the anecdote. I also have met instructors so burned out that they treat their students as mere means. But most of us aren't like that either. When a student only cares (in the loosest sense) at the end of the term, handing in work with all the same mistakes to which we bend our earnest efforts, I would go so far as to say that she's acting immorally: using the instructor as a mere means. It's not seriously harmful, but it's wrong. Now, I don't get worked up about this; I don't much care about minor wrongs. Still, it's morally wrong.

    I do find that in the past fifteen years, students have tended to become more accustomed to instant and informal communication. Some are hourly tweeting or facebooking or whatever their most impulsive thoughts, and can't stop checking their cell phones in class. I think habits of instant communication are deleterious to character virtues. Perhaps if she'd had to write a letter or arrange a meeting, this student would not have shot off such a wrought note.

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  37. Carl

    Kathryn Norlock's comments about electronic communication relate to the overall question in the thread regarding what counts as acceptable social interaction, so even though it doesn't directly relate to grading, I'll respond. I don't tweet, but I do run a fairly wired class, and I think I'd be pleased to learn that students were tweeting blow-by-blows about how the class was going at any given moment. That's a sign that they're engaging with the class, and hopefully with the material. If enough students were doing this, and I thought it wouldn't distract me, I might have a twitter feed running on my laptop to get instant feedback. In short, I'd disagree with her conclusion about character virtues.

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  38. Kathryn J. Norlock

    Carl, I too would be pleased to learn that students were tweeting or facebooking something about the course. Sadly, according to their fellow students, that's not the subject of most of the electronic communications.

    You're right to disagree with my overstatement, though. I should say that I think habits of instant communication are deleterious to particular character virtues, and specifically, some of the character virtues that are conducive to civility, patience, and wise consideration of one's words. (The irony that my quick internet post was not sufficiently thought out! It slays me!)

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  39. an undergraduate

    I go to a small liberal arts college that doesn't disclose grades (unless you're prepared to wade through some murky bureaucratic waters to see them). The average class size at my school is 14 and having the students call the professors by their first names is an institutional policy.

    I have never had a conversation about grades with any of my peers, although I have had many conversations about our professors and their classes, personalities, and teaching styles. Also, I have never observed an incident like the ones described here. People feel embarrassed enough just asking to see their grades before they apply to grad school (because you're not supposed to care about numeric evaluations, only about pure learning, etc. etc. etc.); throwing temper tantrums about percentages seems unimaginable to me.

    Obviously restricting students' access to their grades takes out some of the competitive element of student-student interactions, and frames student-teacher conversations in more qualitative terms. So I won't try to downplay that. I do, however, think that the biggest reason I have never seen a student act rudely/disrespectfully toward a professor (and I really haven't, although I'm sure it must happen–more privately and in subtler ways, maybe) is the fact that we learn in small discussion groups, without lectures, and know our professors very well. Mine have always made themselves available to me, via email, after-class chats, unscheduled office hours, lunch meetings, chance encounters, etc.–I probably talk to my professors more than I talk to most of my peers. This goes for most of us, I think, especially in junior and senior year. We all interact very closely with the professors in our departments, and the notion of ruining a close working relationship with an inflammatory email seems unthinkable.

    I will go out on a limb here and guess that most of the people who've been treated with disrespect by undergraduates do not interact that closely with their students–and perhaps teach lecture-based classes. More importantly, I wonder if their classes are conducted in a way that sincerely invites intellectual conversation, or if it's just lecturing, talking at the audience, and occasionally answering clarification questions. I'm not saying this is something professors should feel guilty about, as it is the only teaching model that makes sense for many large research universities, but it probably contributes to some students' sense of personal detachment from the subject, and from the individual who's teaching it. I know I would be less inclined to be courteous to my professors if I didn't know them so well, if I didn't care so much about their opinion of me as a scholar and as a person. If I were unhappy with my performance and were looking for an outlet, being just a face in the crowd would probably embolden me, by giving me the cover of quasi-anonymity (obviously not real anonymity, but maybe an emotional anonymity of sorts? The state of not knowing and not being known, and not caring) when dealing with the most obvious culprit.

    This is all just idle speculation based on personal anecdata, of course.

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