Photo By Monica Lungu

What is your educational motivation?

Matthew Gerring | Staff Writer
[email protected]

My political science professor told a story last week about a student in his class at Sacramento State University. He had just returned some papers and all of his students were upset about their grades – this particular teacher is very demanding, and not many students had received a good grade.

One student raised his hand to complain. The student said normally he can go cut-and-paste content from the Internet, turn in what he found, and still get a passing grade. He was upset that the same level of effort wasn’t cutting it in my professor’s class.

There are only a few things more irritating than listening to people who have that attitude about education complain about school. It’s as bad as complaining about not having TV on a camping trip, or complaining about sweating on a hot day.

If you can’t stand the heat, as the saying goes, you should stay out of the kitchen.

If you’re not at school to get an education, then what, exactly, are you here for? Isn’t the whole point to be intellectually challenged, so you might, you know, learn something?

Some people think of school as nothing more than a degree mill, with the only objective of their education being a piece of paper certifying that they showed up for the requisite number of hours.
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You know the type – the kind of person who cruises Ratemyprofessor.com trying to find the path of least resistance, hoping to avoid doing any real work all semester. The kind of people who are extremely well-versed in the art of convincingly paraphrasing someone else’s work, but who couldn’t
tell you a single thing about the subject they’re studying even if you put a gun to their head.

To that sort of person, strict grades may seem like an injustice, but the dirty secret about grades is that your professor is under no obligation to grade by a certain set of rules.

Your professors can grade you on totally subjective criteria if they choose to, including that professor’s perception of whether or not you care about the class or the work you’re turning in.

I appreciate the stricter professors – those professors, and the subjects they teach, tend to be the ones that stick with me long after the semester is over. I’ve always figured that’s the whole point.

In my opinion, more teachers should be willing to exercise their right to grade you subjectively, rather than counting points and trying to boil down the extent of your knowledge to an itemized statement.

Students should be judged not only on the quality of their work, but their level of engagement with the subject they’re learning. The fact is, our community college system has limited resources, and there isn’t a lot of room for students that are doing nothing but showing up, cutting, pasting, and coasting.

If you chafe at the idea of an intellectual challenge, maybe you should re-evaluate what you’re doing at school in the first place.

If all you learn is how to fake it really well, then that’s all you’ll ever know. That might cut it with some professors, it won’t cut it in the real world.