The sense of entitlement
In the last 18 months that I have been teaching, the thing that worries me the most is the growing sense of entitlement amongst students. I tell them that the only grade you deserve is a U grade (F grade). Any higher grade, you need to earn. You do not automatically get a grade of your choice just by attending all my classes. Worse still, if you bunked lectures, didn’t submit assignments and performed poorly in tests, on what basis do you expect a non-fail grade?
It turns out that this issue is not limited to any country or a continent. A recent NYT article talks of just this issue:
A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading
Professor Greenberger, who researched causes for the increased sense of entitlement cites “increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety” as the probably reasons. Here at IIT, we feel that the increased focus on “cracking the exams” is a major hindrance from learning and a cause of a lot of anxiety:
“I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”
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