A is for Education

By Jacob Lipnik on December 10, 2014

Over the past couple of weeks, students at University of Michigan have been engaging in one of the most important and stressful activities of the semester. No, not finals. The activity that has been stressing students out (while they probably should be stressing about finals instead) is registering for classes.

It’s obvious why. Everyone wants to get into the best classes, the ones with the best teachers and the best subjects. Right?

Maybe not. After talking to my five roommates about what was important to them when registering for classes, and what was important to the people they knew when registering for classes, it seems that there is one factor that truly matters more than any other–easiness. Students always look for the classes with the best teachers and subjects, but if those classes aren’t easy, there’s just no way they’re going to take them. And if a class has a horrible teacher and a boring subject, but is a guaranteed A, students will almost surely be lined up down the virtual block to register for it.

Most students wish they could search “easy” as their Keyword
(photo taken by the author)

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. For some truly great classes–like John Rubadeau’s famous writing class–students will concede the inevitability of a poor grade. But for the most part, from all the people I’ve talked to, a course that results in an easy A is much more coveted than one that results in an enjoyable and knowledge-gaining experience.

This is especially true for students who have high aspirations for their life after undergrad (wait, that’s all the students at top universities?). Take students in the business school. They are all competing with one another for the top jobs at the top companies once they graduate. Mostly, they are required to take all the same classes within the business school curriculum. However, there are certain types of classes–humanities, for instance–that they must take outside of the business school, through the college of Literature, Science, and the Arts. And if they get an A+ in those LS&A classes, it counts as even higher than a 4.0 towards their GPA. When your university is blatantly rewarding you for taking an easy class, why wouldn’t you? Sure, a business student might be extremely interested in physics or the history of southeast Asia or the linguistics of Middle English. But if those classes aren’t easy A’s, and all his/her classmates are taking classes that are, how can that student justify almost certainly falling behind, almost certainly losing a little competitive advantage? Yes, there’s something to be said about gaining a broader worldview and enhancing your knowledge–which harder classes are more likely to do–but at the end of the day, it is almost always GPA that reigns supreme. So because of the education system that is supposed to promote higher learning and a well-rounded, top notch education, University of Michigan business students are essentially being pressured by every factor around them to trade in great learning experiences for great grades.

And this isn’t just a business school epidemic. For engineering students taking LS&A classes or any elective, even though they don’t have the same rule for A+’s, don’t you think they want to get the best grade possible so that they can stay a step ahead (or at least on equal footing) with their peers, the people they’ll be competing with for jobs in a few short years? My roommate in the engineering school certainly wants that. So do the people applying for grad schools. Personally, I want to go to law school after graduation. There’s only two things law schools care about: LSAT scores and GPA. So even though there are plenty of interesting classes I’d love to take at the university, I know it’s in my best interest to stick instead to the easy classes.

All of this is a huge flaw in higher education. The point of college is for kids to learn as much as possible to prepare them for the real world, to make them as knowledgable as possible. But because of how competitive our job market and our graduate programs have become in the United States, kids don’t go into college with the mindset that they should be learning as much as possible and becoming as knowledgable as possible. The general mindset is, “I’m going to go to college to get the best grades possible so that I can get the best job possible.” While other factors like work experience and extracurriculars are important in getting a job, GPA is certainly one of the most, if not the most, integral factors, as well as the one that can be the most misleading and easily inflated–such as with easy classes.

In the end, what results from that student mindset is a job market full of kids who got great grades but didn’t necessarily receive a great, well-rounded education–or at least not as great of an education as was possible. While the intention behind hiring or accepting into grad programs only those students with the highest GPA is to have the most intelligent and hardworking ones, it’s now possible that part of why post-grads have that high GPA is because they didn’t work hard, because they simply took easier classes. I don’t mean to say that all post-grads aren’t knowledgable and hardworking, but rather that they aren’t as much so as they could’ve been. And that’s a shame.

Finding a solution to this issue isn’t easy. One of my roommates suggested to me that all classes at the university should be standardized–that all should meet the same threshold of difficulty, or that all should have a quota on how many A’s, B’s, etc. can be given. That would certainly minimize the problem of students only choosing the easiest classes, but there are inherent problems in that plan. First, some classes are inherently more difficult; how can a teacher make an introductory physics class as difficult as Calc 4? And how is it fair if a science major needs to take an english class and it’s as hard for him/her as organic chemistry would be to most english majors? Second, what if a class happens to have all its students producing A-level work? Is it fair to only give out 15 A’s when 30 students deserve one?

Perhaps the first, and best, step is to stop incentivizing students to take easier classes. That means the business school would stop giving higher GPA’s to those with an A+. That also means grad schools and employers would look more closely at applications to see how difficult the classes were that led to an applicant’s 4.0. A way that second hypothetical could be accomplished is by colleges creating some sort of “strength of schedule average,” or SOSA (like the concept used in NCAA basketball to help sort out tournament teams), that could calculate how hard, on average, a student’s classes were. So if someone were to see how high a student’s GPA is, they could also see how hard their classes were. If someone had a 4.0 GPA but a 2.0 SOSA, they might not be as great of a candidate as someone with a 3.3 GPA and a 3.7 SOSA. A system like this would not only incentivize higher grades, but also harder, more enriching classes. And this could ultimately lead to a more fulfilled, accomplished, hard working, and knowledgable work force.

That’s not to say this is a perfect system either. There are flaws with the SOSA idea too. For instance, what if a student genuinely enjoys classes that happen to be easier? Should they be penalized for it? This just goes to show that this issue is not only extremely problematic, but also very complex. It won’t be solved over night, or by one person. But if it isn’t solved soon, students will continue to care less about learning and more about getting an easy A.

And that’s not what college is, or should be, all about.

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