You bet. Want to see some students snap to attention? Tell them that in the professions, in management, where they want to be, it’s the rare boss that will let them do C work or even B work, over and over. It’s A work every day, or they can be replaced, and especially these days.
I tell students that and let them know that I was a late-life Ph.D. who hired — and fired — for decades, first. And then I tell them about as many as five hundred applicants even for internships, all those cover letters and resumes to sort, a process in which I sometimes assisted, because I can spell, punctuate, etc. First, yes, out went any with errors, typos, etc.; that usually cut the stack by more than half. The rest were sorted by GPAs, because we wanted reliability, and students who don’t show up and don’t turn in work don’t get good grades. Then the boss looked at the top twenty-five — maybe, if he had time, or I did so — to pick ten to check their credentials, references, and writing samples to narrow the field to five for interviews. Of those, in a good year, two got internships. Often, only one did so. And you bet they had to do A work every day.
from ProfTowanda on the CHE fora