I was a bus driver at a New England university. When I was cleaning up after my shift I found this letter left behind by a student:
I can personally attest to the fact that many students enter college not knowing how to write complete sentences. Such people have no business being enrolled at an institution of higher learning.
Also attached is a series of emails that demonstrate the entitlement mentality many students have. The context behind these emails is thus: It was the END of Physics II. The rule in the class is that if your final exam grade is better than all your grades averaged together, your grade for the course becomes the grade on the final. Pretty good deal, right? You can completely bomb every exam, but if you get an A on the final, you get an A in the course.
As the end of the semester approached many students were failing, but were they attending the extra help sessions? No -- the extra help sessions were barren. One student felt particularly outraged by the grades she earned, and took the liberty to share her throughts about it with the entire class of over 100 students:
physics_coup_redacted.pdf
There were a plethora of extra help sessions offered. The night before the final, I attended the extra help session. Can you believe that there were only TWO other students there!? One student (not the girl in the letters above) asked for a walk-though of a homework problem. The professor -- knowing that being able to teach something is a sign of mastery -- requested that I teach the girl how to solve that particular problem. As I was explaining the answer, she had a puzzled look on her face and requested clarification. I said, "Ok, draw a free body diagram." She didn't know what that was, so I said, "Ok, draw a vector." Her response was, "What's a vector?"
HOW DO YOU GET ALL THE WAY TO THE END OF PHYSICS II AND NOT KNOW WHAT A VECTOR IS!?