Grades used to be inflated. Back in the 1960s, when a kid was faced with either a college acceptance letter or a draft card, any teacher with a modicum of empathy would keep his grades high enough to avoid a potential death sentence in Vietnam. But now, grades are compressed into two, maybe three, of the usual five letters.
Here’s how we know this is true: Google the average GPA of the Ivy League, then move to high-end liberal arts schools, then the top party schools, and finally, your child’s (if you have one) safety school. I’d bet my salary that the average won’t dip below a 3.0 before you reach it. The point is this: most colleges are accepting high-schoolers who received As, Bs, and the rare C. The elite ones only take the As.
And herein lies a serious problem.
Think about the nonsense that’s occurred at elite and mid-level schools since Jonathan Haidt began documenting the problem back in 2014. Speakers chased off campuses, professors yelled at and spit upon, and damages that cost taxpayers in California hundreds of thousands of dollars all occurred within the last five years.
Maybe it’s too bold, but I can’t help believing that these actions stem from the high grades students receive for their writing in English class. And in 2018, students are pushed to write more argumentative pieces that teachers simply don’t have the time to grade accurately. Want to grade 120 essays on a deadline? What are you going to assess? Spelling? Punctuation? Varied syntax? What is syntax? What if they tell you Casper was the main character of Candide?
You get the point. There’s a range of potential errors, from minor to horrific. So, if you’re a public school teacher, take four pages, multiply that by thirty kids, and you’ve finished your first class. Now do that for at least three more. As a private school educator, I’m lucky enough to assign paragraphs (to fewer students) in which they make a clear assertion, support it with credible evidence, and then comment on the connection or significance between the two. Does that sound too rudimentary? At least I’ll know if they have the skeleton of a coherent argument. So ask yourself how teachers forced to assign multi-page essays really know if the writing their kids produce is A-level work? If your solution is more rubrics, we’ve tried that.
But truly give this some thought. Kids who chase speakers off of elite campuses, who scream at professors, who make demands of their presidents, who throw bricks through windows, and send debate moderators away in neck braces, all share a common belief. Every one of them is right. And all the A-essays they’ve received until now have given them no reason to believe otherwise.
If you asked them to defend their actions, they’d use the rhetoric that’s been deemed acceptable by their instructors. At this point, I’d argue that professors in the humanities and education departments are to blame. I say this as someone who holds an English Bachelor’s and a Master’s in Education from a private liberal arts university. Back in the early 2010s, I unconsciously coasted through the premonitions of what we’re currently seeing, and almost got sucked into the muck. If you’re getting As on your essays, as I was, you don’t stop to think about the argument you’ve written, to say nothing of the evidence used to support it. Once I realized that my content was in line with my professor’s beliefs, the quality of my writing was of no consequence.
I worry about my students, because I care about them. I want them to be literate when they arrive at college. I want them to be able to separate concrete, factually based prose from slippery rhetoric. I don’t want them to ignore the objective literature of their discipline because it upsets or offends them. I want them to engage in debate, discourse, and to seek the truth.
But I can’t give them all As to do it.
Michael O’Keefe is a boarding school English teacher and football coach. A native New Englander, he has worked in both northeast Ohio and the Mid-Atlantic region for the last five years.
