A recent study at the University of California, Irvine found that many college and university students feel more entitled to higher grades for less work than in the past.
The findings suggest that students believe they deserve an A letter grade for simply coming to class and reading the material, University Assoc. Psychology Prof. Shige Oishi said. The study, titled “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” noted that a third of students surveyed expect B’s for attending lectures, while another 40 percent of students surveyed expect B’s for finishing required course readings only.
“We have had one or two incidents a semester that reach the level of formal appeal for reconsideration of a grade,” University English Department Chair Jahan Ramazani’s said. He added, though, that an occasional complaint among many hundreds of students is to be expected.
Part of the study focused on understanding the origins of what researchers referred to as a sense of entitlement.
According to the study, “the self-esteem movement of the 1980s, which emphasized the importance of engendering self-esteem in youth but has been criticized since that time for not linking self-esteem to the development of skills and competencies, has been held to task for the growth of self-centered attitudes in the younger generation.”
Oishi said in some instances, very high self-esteem is associated with a greater degree of aggression.
Among these cases, students will retaliate more strongly to negative feedback from professors. This behavior shows a self-serving bias in attribution in which students blame low grades on external factors instead of themselves, Oishi said.
Second-year College student Samantha Hoelzer said she found herself frustrated with a grade she received in a lecture-style statistics class. She said she believes that statistics classes are not structured well at the University, and added that “the ability to have a smaller class setting is helpful.”
The study suggested another possibility in which “academic self-entitlement constitutes a coping strategy for students who experience a decline in grades, as may happen when they confront the more stringent demands of college and university course work and the more academically selective pool of fellow-students in that setting.”
The transition from high school to college is sometimes difficult “because many of the people who come to Virginia were valedictorians [and were] used to receiving straight As,’” Ramazani said.
Once at the University, however, students find themselves in a situation where several students are at the top of their class, and distinctions must be made, Ramazani said. After adjusting to University life, additional pressure to maintain a high GPA for graduate school applications and misconceptions about peers’ grades can lead students to demand better grades, Oishi explained.
“Our 4.0 system has stopped being meaningful because of the problem of grade inflation,” said graduate College student Jen Burstein.
When students consider a B+ to be average, they “think that a baseline amount of effort ought to merit an A,” Burnstein said, adding that she believes this is a “very economical view of education.”
Ramazani said he believes the quality of work should determine the end grade, adding that this method generally is the most fair for all students in a given class. Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, was unavailable for comment as of press time.
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