Today in accounting we had a major project due. We were basically auditing a company and using everything we have learned from the text book in real life. My partner and I worked for around ten hours in total and after it was done I felt a sense of pride in my work. I took a companies expenses and revenues from a year and basically turned them into a readable document. While I know I will never do accounting for a job, it was a cool feeling to know I got a taste of what they do for a living. When I talked to my partner he was only worried about getting an A on the project and passing the class.
This made me realize how different mastery and performance oriented learners truly are in a college world. Some people wish for nothing else but a perfect transcript to get a job straight out of college. They do not care what material they learn, they see it the same as they have seen every course from high school; a set of data to memorize in order to pass a test. This makes me worried for the future of our work force because people who do this are seen as the best coming out of college, but hey may not truly understand what they have learned.
On the other hand, mastery learners do not care about the grade, but instead how well they understand the material. These people will retain the knowledge from classes much better than there performance oriented counterparts. But these people may not have the same drive to get perfect marks, which makes them look less desirable in the eyes of employers. This schism needs to be resolved or I feel like the system will only perpetuate. The highest end of learning may need to stop giving grades and instead use a non-numerical grade system to really show how hard the students worked.
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