Experts at getting A’s

According to a story in today’s LA Times (sadly, registration required):

Today’s college freshmen got more A’s than ever in high school while studying a record low number of hours in their senior year, according to a national survey by UCLA. But they may not be any smarter than those of past generations.

Instead, frenzied competition for college admission has inflated grades and trained students to become experts at winning A’s, say the survey’s director and college students and officials in Southern California.

“Students are more savvy about what it takes to get an A,” said Linda J. Saxon, the UCLA education professor who directed this year’s American Freshman Survey, which has been tracking students’ opinions and habits for 37 years.

In the classes she teaches, students now “focus more of their energies studying what it takes to get a grade.” They might be able to study less if they focus on that as the outcome, rather than on learning, which would take more time, she said.

Well, is anyone surprised? Christ, everything is so high stakes today, of course you need an A in everything you do. Competition for grades is killing any desire on the part of children to learn, as has been so well described by Alfie Kohn in Punished By Rewards, a book I cannot recommend highly enough. If you’ve ever wondered what’s wrong with incentives like grades, Kohn will explain it for you.

One change Kohn recommends to our system of grading is changing to a system where you get an A or an incomplete. You’ve either done the work, or you haven’t.

Of course, a great many people would howl bloody murder if their kid can’t have a much better GPA than the next kid. The current grading system enforces the notion that some children must be left behind. As the article in the Times goes on to say:

At one prestigious Los Angeles prep school, which he asked not to be identified, Poch said he had found every student in an English class earned either an A or an A-minus.

Well, you know, maybe everyone in the class did the work to get an A, you know? Should we have a system where some kids are forced to fail?