Will guns on campus lead to grade inflation?

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Will Guns on Campus Lead to Grade Inflation?

By Jessica Smartt Gullion 4/30/15 at 11:48 AM

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With this proposed law, a question coming up for many academics is whether they would be forced to give A grades to undeserving students, just so they can avoid being shot.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In my five years as a college professor, I have had experiences with a number of emotionally distressed students who resort to intimidation when they receive a lesser grade than what they feel they deserve.

Threats on Campus

Here is an example of one such threatening experience. One evening in a graduate course, after I handed back students’ papers, a young woman stood up and pointed at me. “This is unacceptable!” she screamed as her body shook in rage.

She moved toward the front of the class, waving her paper in my face, and screamed again, “Unacceptable!” After a heated exchange, she left the room and stood outside the door sobbing.

All this was over receiving a B on a completely low-stakes assignment.

What followed was even more startling. The following week, the student brought along a muscle-bound man to class. He watched me through the doorway window for the entire three hours of the class, with his arms folded across his chest.

And if this wasn’t enough, the young woman’s classmates avoided me on campus because, they said, they were afraid of getting caught in the crossfire should she decide to shoot me.

After that, every time she turned in a paper I cringed and prayed that it was good so that I wouldn’t have to give her anything less than an A.

Learning from this experience, I now give papers back only at the end of the class or just “forget” to bring them with me. I was lucky that the student didn’t have a gun in my classroom. Other professors have not been so lucky.

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So the question is, Will we soon see a new sort of grade inflation, with students earning a 4.0 GPA with their firepower rather than brainpower? And if so, what sort of future citizenry will we be building on our campuses?

http://www.newsweek.com/will-guns-campus-lead-grade-inflation-327047

[Duckhunter935]

1. No

[Travis_0004]

2. Let me see if I understand this right?

This assumes that there are college students who would shoot their professor over a bad grade, but right now there is a sign saying 'no guns allowed', and that sign is what is preventing people from committing attempted murder.

And this also ignores the fact that most college students are under 21, and not eligible to get a concealed carry permit anyway.

[aikoaiko]

6. +1

I've faced angry students whose grades I issued ended their college careers at my school and that's just part of the job.

[TeddyR]

11. Exact point I was going to make

Preposterous to think that concealed carry is going to somehow increase the chance that there will be a shooting.

[Orrex]

12. If most college students are too young for CCL, then why allow guns at all?

Will they sit in class with an AR-15 across their desk?

[Eleanors38]

3. Is it even possible after the 60s?

[cherokeeprogressive]

4. This presupposes "Grade Inflation" isn't and hasn't been happening already.

[former9thward]

5. This story sounds completely made up.

If someone was watching at the window at a professor for three hours any reasonable person would call campus security. Why didn't she?

[GGJohn]

7. Cool story bro.

So far, there's been no such problem with college campuses that allow for concealed carry, why should it start now?

[GGJohn]

8. If this story were true, cough cough,

why didn't the teacher call the cops? Why wasn't this "muscle bound man" removed from the school grounds?
No school allows for strangers to hang around intimidating faculty or students, this story smells like bullshit.

[Igel]

9. No.

The professors that insist on meeting standards will continue to do so.

The provosts that continue to be politicians will argue over it with those professors.

The students who really can't accept accountability or responsibility, who view imperfections as other people's problems, will continue to do so. Those who see a correlation between their grades and their performance and effort will continue to become a smaller and smaller fraction of the student body. Those who don't see any such connection and blame professors and everybody else for their failure will continue to grow, like the buttocks of a person who consumes 4000 calories a day.

That the goal of education is the grades and the piece of paper at the end; they're told that motivation is properly external; they're told that they have achieved mastery of a topic when they learn just the bare, explicit essentials at the 75% level. Since the essentials is often 60% of a topic, that means "mastery" and a good, solid C is what used to be the severely failing grade of 45. An A is what we used to call "a 60."

They're trained in shoddy primary and secondary schools that this the proper course of action and how things should be, since their personal history, all that's really relevant, goes back only several years. They're trained that they're victims and have rights and no obligations, grievances but no imperfections. We get what we encourage.

This is part of the problem. We train them in high school, and in high school the high-stakes testing + rigor movements have led to inflated expectations as we try to get all kids, even those with crappy preparation at the trailing edge of the intelligence scale, ready for college. "All kids can learn anything at a high level ..." with nary a thought as to what that "..." might possibly be. Having duped them in high school, we pay for it in college and in what comes in. Go-go GIGO.

[AlinPA]

10. Yes, it may happen. As the US becomes more desensitized to killings and the numbers of guns

everywhere continues to increase, threats to professors by gun wielding students seems very possible. Guns and killings seem to be growing in the US culture.