There’s a brilliant moment in the brilliant Pixar movie “The Incredibles” in which the villain, Syndrome, talks about how the weapons he concocted have given him powers equal to that of any superhero.
“And when I’m old and I’ve had my fun, I’ll sell my inventions so that everyone can have powers,” he says. “Everyone can be super! And when everyone’s super … no one will be.”
Now, this monologue could be applicable to many, many facets of the institutionalized mediocrity that permeates our society. But I most recently found myself reminded of it while reading a column on Slate.com from a college professor named Rebecca Schuman. The headline: “Confessions of a grade inflator,” which isn’t as clever as the headline on a similar column she wrote two years ago for Huffington Post — “Grading Time: I Give Up, You’re All Exceptional.”
“The ugly truth is that to get below a B+ in my class, you have to be a total screw-up,” Schuman writes. The reason for that? “If I graded truly fairly — as in, a C means actual average work — the ‘customers’ would do their level best to ruin my life.”
Schuman admits that she caves in to the “tenacious complaints” of grade-grubbers, “which can be so single-minded that one wonders what would happen if they had applied one-fifteenth of that focus to their coursework.”
Schuman isn’t proud of her weakness, but she’s realistic. And she’s not alone. Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy have examined grade inflation at 200 four-year American colleges and universities, and they found that 43 percent of all letter grades at those schools are A’s. In 1960, about 15 percent of grades at U.S. colleges were A’s; in 1988, the number was 30 percent. Rojstaczer and Healy also found that the percentage of B’s was relatively constant, meaning the additional A’s came at the expense of C’s, D’s and F’s.
Everyone, apparently, is super these days. Which means that nobody is.
“In a fair grading system, you reward people for their outstanding achievements,” Rojstaczer told USA Today last year. “It’s a fair system for students who are working hard and are creative to excel. (Grade inflation) lowers the intensity and intellectual level in many classes.”
Of course, this everybody-is-exceptional ethos isn’t limited to colleges. Grade inflation has been documented at lower levels of education; we strive to tell kids that “everyone’s a winner”; and for some reason we decided that everybody who plays on a youth sports team should get a trophy at the end of the season. Last year, Enterprise High School in Alabama named 34 co-valedictorians, and South Medford High School in Oregon selected 21, diminishing the accomplishments of the most outstanding students.
Celebrating mediocrity
We have become a society that celebrates participation and mediocrity at the expense of true excellence. Because, heaven forbid we should tell children they are anything less than super in every endeavor. Plus, this way we can partake in the pinnacle of meaningless accolades by putting a “My child made the Honor Roll” sticker on our minivans.
With students growing up in this kind of culture, by the time they get to college, “I can’t handle being the person who causes their young faces to crumple at the sight of that B, or, egad, C, which they equate with abject failure,” Schuman writes. “There’s no real solution here, short of a standardized, universal, scorched-Earth approach that brings back the curve — a real curve, where the average grade really is a C.”
That might solve the problem of grade inflation in colleges, but it won’t cure the overriding infection of mislabeled mediocrity. No, that will be up to parents, the ones who need to tell their children that it’s OK to fail; that they aren’t always exceptional; that you aren’t a winner just because you show up; and that sometimes you need to try harder if you want to succeed.
Because the truth is that not everyone is super. And we’ll be better off when we stop insisting that they are.
