Question 2

What do you think is causing students to feel entitled to receive a good grade? Is it because a grade of A is now the expected default for "average" work where in reality an A denotes "above average"? Are the students prior experiences in high school or earlier the cause? Are parents to cause "my child is perfect so it must be the instructors fault"?

I think that the reason students feel they should receive an A for their C level of work comes from the fact that classes they've had in the past teach them that an A is average, not above average. However, their past experience is not the root cause. I believe the root cause is our idea of "customer service". A school is a business. So, when "customers" (which depending on the grade level could be the students or the parents) complain, the business does its best to adapt to change as to not loose customers. However, WE ARE LAZY! Being lazy makes us like easy. This means that we will complain if we feel we are given too much work. As a business, schools will often try to decrease the work load as to not loose customers. One way to get around this is in high school the making of making AP (advanced placement) classes. In theses classses, you expected an increased level of work. However, in college that kind of went away. While there are classes on different levels (200lvl vs 300lvl), students most often have to take lower level classes to get to the higher level classes. There's also the fact that a lot of degrees mostly require 100lvl/200lvl classes. This would seem to say that we expect less from students today. So yes, parents thinking that the instructor is the problem is a large part of the problem because they are the "customers" complaining. However, the problem doesn't just come from the "customers" but also the employees. Many teachers have hundreds of students per term. This means that if a teacher has 120 students and s/he gives the students a 10 pg paper to do, the teacher has 1200 pages to read. Assuming the teacher doesn't just give the one assignment, this means the teacher would have to read thousands of pages per term. That's a lot of reading for one teacher and I cant say that I know a whole lot of people who are willing to read that much. This issue can lead to teachers giving out assignments that require little to not effort to grade as well as grading assignments lightly which can lead to the perception of an "easy A."