I noticed on the front page of The Star today an article about how students in university are getting coddled and how marks are slowly getting inflated. Mark inflation is nothing new. Even when I was in high school, several newspaper articles detailed how many students were receiving higher grades than they should have. It was particularly discouraging to hear that when I, like many of my classmates, were facing 6-8 hours of homework each night just to remain competitive.

What is new is how this effect has now essentially been embraced by universities and how they are making efforts to prevent failures. For many of my peers in university, I'm sure that they wished that such infrastructure existed when they were attending school. I've known of numerous students who were forced to leave due to poor grades, despite having a passing grade in almost all subjects.

After reading the article in The Star, I went to its website to find more articles in the series. The most interesting was this article about how elementary and high schools are effectively not failing students anymore. The article also pointed out something which was new to me: Students were not to be penalized for handing in assignments late. Since I am now old enough to recall things "back in the day", I can state that no such option existed in high school for me. In high school, the same policy as law school applied: You lost 5% of your grade for every day that the assignment was late, up to a maximum of 25%, at which time a call to your parents was made. Alright, so in law school they didn't call our parents for late assignments, but nobody in law school ever handed in an assignment that late because the difference between a "B" and "B+" was significant enough.

People who know me will tell you that the downfall of public education will get me as angry as Haterz hearing that Casey Serin has blown more money on Jamba Juice, and the reason is simple. In high school, students in my class were forced to work hard and make personal sacrifices to basically keep up with the average students at other schools. Now students are just being handed what they want without working for it. Hard work, sacrifice, and sometimes failure, are all a right of passage that students must face because without it, one can never know the joys of success and the bitterness of failure. But then again, maybe I'm wrong because I'm part of a "selfish generation".