A recent study USA Today reported on found 20 percent of college students do not do all of their assigned homework - and still manage to pull As.
The study itself is shaky and it doesn't even attempt to answer many of the questions it brings up. Nevertheless, the overall theme of its finding is solid - college students often do only enough to get by, and professors are often all too willing to reward them with As.
College students can't be faulted for doing what students have been and always will be doing. For every Plato, there was some other schmuck who would blow off Socrates' lectures and do whatever it was the ancient Greeks did for fun. It is not different now - procrastination is part of academics. Problems arise when those who don't do their work are given the same grade as those who did.
Grade inflation kills a student's incentive to work and encourages students to tread the academic waters, doing only enough to stay afloat. If a professor is willing to fish them out and give them an A, there's no reason to work any harder. The contemporary grading scale has turned As into average, and Bs into sub-average. Getting a C is akin to failing.
Even worse for students is when a professor refuses to play the game and doesn't give out the coveted As. A student's future employer won't know - or care - that your substandard GPA is due to a tough professor, rather than laziness.
Some colleges have started using bell-curves to combat grade inflation. With a bell-curve system professors are required to only give out a certain amount of each grade. While this system will certainly decrease the unnecessary inflation, it will also penalize those who do all of their work and are still given a B, just to satisfy an arbitrary rule that sets the amount of As that can be given out.
There needs to be a middle ground between these two extremes. One way kills incentive by encouraging students to do as little as possible work for an A; the other way kills incentive by possibly deflating the importance of a student's hard work.
A class's composition is dynamic. Some will be filled with driven over-achievers who all deserve As. Other classes will be filled with slackers who don't deserve higher than a B. University administrations, AU included, need to sit down and produce a plan that will reward and punish students who do and don't do their work.
