Entitlement Sucks

I wrote this for facebook, but liked it so much I decided to put it here, too, for when I get sick of facebook and all its cheezy applications.
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Okay, maybe I'm a luddite, or maybe I'm finally feeling my age (gasp!), but the July issue of O Magazine (you know, the one with Oprah on every cover) has an article about "helicopter parents" -- the ones who hover over their children and live vicariously over them.

Gods and Goddesses help me, but I can't help but feel throughly disgusted with these parents. Since when does a 24 year old need his mother to come clean his dorm room and do his laundry?! And since when does a parent call a company recruiter to get his or her (the article focused on mothers) child an internship? When I was 18, I would have been MORTIFIED if my mother had called a potential employer to extol my virtues. Simply mortified.

But, it does help explain the emails I get from students demanding I regrade their work. Not based on anything substantial, mind you, but because they themselves "don't feel like I deserved a C." It has become my mantra to state, over and over, that "I don't give grades, you earn them." And yet I feel somewhat besieged by this idea that *their* opinion of their work matters more than my own. Never mind that there is a rubric, attached to every paper, that clearly states exactly how the grade was earned. I don't grade based on how well I like or dislike a student -- in fact, on tests, I deliberately turn all the blue book covers over, so that I don't know whose test I'm grading until I'm done with it. (There have been times when the student who doesn't show up, or who falls asleep in class, has done extraordinarily well, and it galls me, but they earned that A.)

Okay, I feel a little bit better, but really, can we get some sanity here? FERPA matters. And so does the integrity of the academy. Grade inflation is rampant, and the amount of work it takes to flunk a student makes everyone want to avoid it. When C work gets an A, what does that really say about the world? I would rather be the professor who gives REAL grades, whom the great students love and those with a sense of entitlement hate, than compromise learning. If that makes my ratings on ratemyprofessor go down, so be it. At least I know that I stand for something.