Grade-grubbing undergraduates are darkly comical in education

By Nyasigo Kornel

GLANCING at the desk of Dr. Safari Josephat, an education consultant with African Education Research Alliance (AERA), you will see bunch of papers, at once you may thinks he is one of those careless dads who place anything anywhere, however, this is an arrangement of a skeptical scholar who scrutinizes different graduate certificates who scores high class and try to see whether the quality of certificates matches their performance.

The man says that his research has found the relation between what graduates score and what they score in career performance.

“Scoring A’s make papers and certificates look beautiful, for many students ‘A’ looks like ladder on which one has step on for the better, unfortunately most of those who get these A’s do not look like it, some even look like F’s,” says Dr. Safari.

The research result reveals that of 100 students who scored first class at the University level 90 perform their job within their career very well, but the worse enough is for their counterpart who get second class upper where only 20 students out of 100 hundred who got the class satisfy the needs of their employers.

Dr Safari says that even mere scholars who haven't yet taught know what undergraduates are like: they think they are much smarter than they are, they feel entitled to A's without having to work for them, they party all the time, they get their money from Daddy and don't have to work. They cheat and lie to lecturers. They just want grades and aren't interested in learning.

“We have graded reams of god-awful written assignments, received grade requests where a student admits they didn't fulfill the assignment but doesn't feel it's fair to take off as many points as the rubric specifies, and seen students come in hung over and sleep through class and come into office hours wearing expensive clothes, mini-skirts or cash into their lattes, making colleges a place where PCB should investigate for corruption,” says Dr. Safari.

Dr. Kimaro David is also lecturing various Universities in Tanzania, he says he is a flying lecturer because the course he is teaching has few professionals making him a hot cake, he says that they have caught students in blatant cheating attempts and suspected them of others, but lacked the evidence to prove anything.

Dr. Kimaro says that Universities have classes where the only thing students ask about a particular topic is whether it will be on the test.

“The above are stereotypes, but stereotypes with grains of truth throughout. My own undergraduate experience fit poorly with the above. I care deeply about learning, but was not so naive as to overlook the importance of grades,” says Dr. Kimaro in sad face with patriotic look.

In his lecturing experience and methods, he thinks that for many of the lecturers he spoke with, attention to learning and attention to grades were either or; discussion of grades and attempts to get clarification on grading standards and expectations, were often interpreted as grade-grubbing or as attempts to get lecturers to commit to certain grades before turning in assignments. Dr Kimaro found this frustrating and confusing at the time.

Steven Mwatepa is a second year student at the University of Dar es Salaam taking bachelor degree in laws, in his academic experience at the Mlimani he says that being a freshman at the college and trying to adjust to college was difficult and anxiety-producing.

“For my first year, I quite literally was studying or in class whenever I was not sleeping, eating, or attending to personal hygiene, and found the lack of support for improving my academic skills unexpected. The disparity between my freshman exhaustion and the stereotype of the partying, grade-grubbing undergraduate was darkly comical,” Mwatepa testifies.

Prof. Festo Matambo is just back from Califonia State University in USA where he used to teach Afro-America Affair at the Department of International Relations, he is now a colleague to Dr. Safari Josephat, trying to make his retirement as consultant AERA, in this account he says that students vary widely in their motivation, skills, and expectations. Some students want A’s with as little work as they can get away with and view student-teacher goals as antagonistic; some students want good grades and want to learn and expect a cooperative, mutually-trusting student-teacher relationship.

Although the former may outnumber the latter (this is an empirical question), meaning "members of the first category" when we say "students" unnecessarily punishes members of the second category, who display the behavior we want to encourage, and increases poor behavior among students who may feel that if they are going to be treated as entitled grade-grubbers, they have little to lose from actually being so.

Students, of course, also have stereotypes of teachers, and specific stereotypes of teaching assistants. Teachers are pushovers or overly strict (and, sometimes, fair); they may tell you are stupid if you ask them questions.

“Teachers are clueless, disinvested in teaching, unintelligible, haven't taught enough to be able to help students, and sometimes just behave inappropriately. I have experienced some of these myself, and heard enough representative stories to know that these stereotypes are about as accurate as teacher stereotypes of students,” says Prof. Matambo.

He says that in both situations, students and teachers are on uncertain ground. Both know that their performance in and outside of the classroom affects their careers; both know or suspect that their abilities may not be sufficient to meet their goals.

Prof Matambo advices that stereotyping the other party can help reduce blame, and stereotyping while in a group can help you bond together and attribute potential failures to lack of commitment on the part of the other party, which creates anger and resentment but can allay anxiety.

Zamoyoni Mashaka is education student at the University of Dar es Salaam and having studied at old age after being a teacher for years, he says that what the similarities between students and teachers do not change is that teachers genuinely have more power in the classroom than students, and though teachers may be unprepared and stressed and frustrated, the power to reduce mutual stereotyping is more theirs than anyone else's.

He says that still more involve remembering that many freshmen enter college socialized into identifying who they are with getting A's, who may have little else to base their sense of self on, who are entering an environment that threatens to take that away, and who have not had the time or experience necessary to develop socially appropriate ways to deal with that and who may be grasping for straws to keep that together.

“Many freshmen are also dealing with mild culture shock; high school culture carries a different set of expectations for performance and sometimes a different set of norms for appropriate behavior (including, unfortunately, plagiarism), says Zamoyoni.

A’s may make a people feel that a student is a intelligent, but good practical performance may make most feel that he is genius.