Rewards and consequences

In the last two days two students wrote to me about different things which seem to have the same theme. I do not want to extrapolate from the words of two to the beliefs of many. However I have heard or read enough similar ideas in the last seven years to think that there are many students who have identical or very similar ideas at least at some time in their academic careers. Since I teach all first semester students perhaps these ideas change over their time at school, I hope so.

The first idea was from a student who said I did not mark his last assignment fairly. He deserved a better mark because of the time he took to think about it and write it. This idea is often expressed as "I tried so hard" My immediate thought when I hear this expressed (which I rarely say out loud to students) is "we get rewarded for achieving, not for trying." (In the words of Yoda "there is no try, do or do not.") This particular student told me how long he worked on the assignment, which is quite unusual. I gather he expected me to be impressed that he spent two hours working on an assignment that is worth 5% of his final mark in the course. So I did a little math. If two hours equals 5%, then forty hours equals 100%. Since it is a fourteen week course, that is a little less than three hours a week. That is a reasonable amount of time for each course and it is practical for most students. The student had five weeks to do the most recent assignment, that suggests the student should have used more than two hours to do the most recent assignment, possibly as much as fifteen hours. If I marked his assignment solely in terms of reward for time spent I gave him far more than he "deserved".

The second idea came from a student who thought I treated her unfairly because of the mark I gave her for not following the rules for the assignment. (These rules have been the rules for two test and two other assignments, and she followed these same rules four times before.) Her rationale for requesting an adjustment: "everyone makes mistakes". I had to agree with that comment, everyone does make mistakes. I thought about that idea briefly and then I passed on the following idea to her. Everyone does make mistakes. However, every mistake has at least one consequence. She saw the consequence of her mistake in her mark.

Both of the above ideas seem to based in the idea that because I do something, no matter what it is, I deserve a reward, not the appropriate consequence but something positive just because I did something. This is appropriate when children are being toilet trained, but it is not how employers treat employees and it is not how post-secondary students (or even secondary students) should be treated. All actions have consequences, some consequences are positive and some are not.