I recently attended a science competition that my daughter had entered with her school team. While the program and competition are really neat, I couldn't believe the awards ceremony. Medals were awarded for fourth place, FOURTH PLACE. If that wasn't enough, ribbons were given to teams that earned 5th-11th place. Seriously?! 11th place?! I love my daughter and I love watching her compete; and while I am quite proud of her, I don't believe 11th place is worthy of celebrating with a ribbon...
We have been blessed with two beautiful, wonderful, super intelligent daughters. They are totally brag-worthy. They earn spots in many competitions. I believe I am developing an allergy to bees; spelling bees, geography bees, bee bees...
Between them our girls have pretty much earned just about every academic honor possible for elementary school children. At the end of the school year their elementary school hosts an awards ceremony. IT...IS...PAINFUL! Our then, 5th grader, earned the highest academic achievement award for EVERY category. She also broke some records and earned some significant honors. Instead of just calling her up once and listing her honors, she had to keep walking across the stage to receive her awards. Receiving the special recognition is fine for the most significant awards, however, that day the girls walked away with enough paper awards to wallpaper an entire bedroom. In my opinion that is WAY TOO MANY AWARDS. That day students were given an award for completing 25 Accelerated Reading points. To put it into perspective our daughter earned over 600 AR points (100 points is expected of 5th graders). An award for completing 25 points is saying "Congratulations, you read significantly less than expected of you."
So what is wrong with giving an 11th place ribbon or an award for completing 25% of what was expected? Quite a bit. I've been noticing it more and more with my first-year college students. They turn in a paper that is not even close to the requirements laid out for them in a rubric and act shocked when they don't receive an "A" grade. They seriously don't understand why I have graded them so harshly, clearly I don't know what I'm doing; After all, they've never received such a low grade on a paper before (C's = F's in their minds). It is at that point I remind them that they've never been to college before and then show them where I had grace with their papers.
We're raising a generation of people who are entitled and ok with doing the minimum work but expecting the highest honor. They are essentially mediocre students that believe they are far above mediocracy. How can we blame them when we've given them awards for 2nd to last place and for doing 25% of what's expected of them?
I'm not saying abolish all awards, excellence should be rewarded, but too many gold stars diminish the value of the star. Giving students awards for mediocre work creates students who are ok with being mediocre instead of striving to be and do better and, at the end of the day, we all lose from that.
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