大学英语精读Unit7languagework.docVIP

Unit 7 Letter to a B Student Robert Oliphant Your final grade for the course is B. A respectable grade. Far superior to the “Gentleman’s C” that served as the norm a couple of generations ago. But in those days A’s were rare: only two out of twenty-five, as I recall. Whatever our norm is, it has shifted upward, with the result that you are probably disappointed at not doing better. I’m certain that nothing I can say will remove that feeling of disappointment, particularly in a climate where grades determine eligibility for graduate school and special programs.1 Disappointment. It’s the stuff bad dreams are made of: dreams of failure, inadequacy, loss of position and good repute. The essence of success is that there’s never enough of it to go round in a zero-sum game2 where one person’s winning must be offset by another’s losing, one person’s joy offset by another’s disappointment.2 You’ve grown up in a society where winning is not the most important thing — it’s the only thing.3 To lose, to fail, to go under, to go broke — these are deadly sins in a world where prosperity in the present is seen as a sure sign of salvation in the future. In a different society, your disappointment might be something you could shrug away. But not in ours.4 My purpose in writing you is to put your disappointment in perspective by considering exactly what your grade means and doesn’t mean. I do not propose to argue here that grades are unimportant. Rather, I hope to show you that your grade, taken at face value, is apt to be dangerously misleading, both to you and to others. As a symbol on your college transcript, your grade simply means that you have successfully completed a specific course of study, doing so at a certain level of proficiency. The level of your proficiency has been determined by your performance of rather conventional tasks: taking tests, writing papers and reports, and so forth. Your performance is generally assumed to correspond to the knowledge yo