In a lot of team sports, coaches tend to scold players who look at the scoreboard. In families, sibling rivalries are avoided because they abide by gentle, parental advice to “mind your own business.” Do students these days find school fun without looking at their grades?
The fun in learning is important as students keep returning to — rather than cutting — classes for more. But more and more college students are becoming Churchills, thinking: “Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.” Plus a few more Franklins, saying: “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
Welcome to the world of grade inflation. The higher the grades, the more enthusiastic the learners become (which is wrong on so many levels).
Unfortunately, the British statesman and the United States founding father would surely distance themselves from high grades-rewarded students. Learning was the two influential leaders’ own reward and they just wanted to immediately make an impact on society. With today’s atmosphere of inflation of grades and honors, the young leaders, the student leaders, and their student bodies are being held back by yet another social vulnerability and peer difficulties.
Rather than eyeing the desired behavior, students’ concentration is nearly on getting high grades, loving them as rewards. Grades have become an extrinsic motivator. We were alarmed of the phenomenon of grade inflation 20 years ago, and it was so wild we almost considered ourselves helpless. Likened to the growth of municipalities that are eventually being converted as cities, what the local leaders tend to forget is the growing number of street children while trumpeting accomplishments in governance.
We need to help change the mindset of our students vis-à-vis the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Parents and professors may help them get deeply involved in their subject/course endeavors and let them enjoy challenges, including but not limited to, punishing their mediocrity through giving them low grades. There are many ways and we may essentially embrace the phenomenon of grade inflation, but how about changing the systems in grading the students, the tenured and non-tenured professors? (We may tackle that in the future in this column.)
What is crucial at this point is to institute reforms in education so that inequality will not be felt much by vulnerable students. Grades do not matter to them, but we may listen to their noble suggestion, one of which is to let others earn their grades the hard way.
DC Alviar
Professor DC Alviar serves as a member of the steering committee of the Philippine International Studies Organization (PHISO). He was part of National University’s community extension project that imparted the five disciplines of a learning organization (Senge, 1990) to communities in a local government unit. He writes and edits local reports for Mega Scene. He graduated with a master’s degree in development communication from the University of the Philippines Open University in Los Baños. He recently defended a dissertation proposal for his doctorate degree in communication at the same graduate school under a Philippine government scholarship grant. He was editor-in-chief of his high school paper Ang Ugat and the Adamson News.
