As yet another semester comes to a close, the inevitable explosion of students who realize only too late that their grades aren’t as high as they would like is coming in. Mercifully, there have only been a few e-mails, and I have made myself scarce over the past week to avoid too many run-ins. I can only imagine the similar troubles of the professors teaching the course I’m a TA for.

It’s a disconcerting trend that I thought happened only recently with students I graduated from high school with: the presumptuous belief that if a student doesn’t like his or her grade, he can just go negotiate with the teacher to get the grades higher. An article I found as a freshman in college revealed to me that this trend is far older than I suspected.

I could almost, almost, understand this trend if the students would make up excuses. Grandmothers drop like flies during the months of May and December, unexplained and mysterious illnesses strike for two lab periods and then disappear just in time to make up the labs and turn them in with a doctor’s note. I can almost give some credit to these; they aren’t terribly creative, but they at least show some effort to excuse poor performance with actual catastrophic events.

But every year there is a bunch of students who make no excuses at all. They spend all semester underperforming, and then at the end, they just come to you and ask if you could bump their 67 up to a 70. “Why?” I ask myself. “Do they honestly think I’m that kind-hearted? That the fact that they are failing out of college is somehow my responsibility to repair?” My personal favorite is the “I had a busy semester” attempt to get me to understand. I would be understanding, except I took just as many classes as they did, but I had to spend twice as much time in lab each week, and I had to grade them. Yet I still found time to get my work done and still have some fun on the side.

It seems to me that a disturbing number of students think college is some sort of vacation from reality. But who can blame them? High schools routinely go through a process of “social promotion” and grade inflation to keep the all-important tax-paying parents happy, and as a result many of these students have no idea what it means to actually understand a subject. High schools in this country prepare you for college in much the same way that playing the Operation board game gets people ready for three years in medical school.

Perhaps we shouldn’t blame the students. After all, they had spent the previous twelve or more years of their life in a system with standards so low that the products of their math and science courses do not know how to do basic algebra, and think that “1.7 E -5″ is the proper notation for “1.7 X 10^-5″. They’ve grown up in a system that kicks you up to the next level so you don’t have to deal with the social stigma of being held back a grade. It would be a pity, nay, a travesty, to hold students to standards that 30% of them might not be able to live up to, unless the local School Boards really feel like making their Sergeant-at-Arms earn their keep at each board meeting.

Or perhaps we should. After all, there seems to always be a few students who came out of that mess capable, competent, and willing to go the mileage to succeed. Handing out A’s like candy on Halloween may make the habitual whiners feel better, but what does it tell those who earned the A the old fashioned way? I believe firmly that a meritocracy is the best society that can be formed, with those who are good at what they do able to succeed beyond those who do not. Failing to me is as abhorrent as succeeding is delightful. But what do I know? I just grade their lab reports…