self-sabotage

The New York Times had an interesting article yesterday on a phenomenon I've noticed many times among students: self-sabotage. Self-sabotage is when a student is well on his or her way to passing a class, even acing it, and then at the last minute does something so monumentally self-defeating that she fails it anyway.

I had this happen just last semester. A student failed to turn in a final project that was worth 50% of the grade. This after an entire fifteen weeks of submitting assignments and doing the work--a bare minimum of the work, in this case, but still, enough to pass with a fairly decent grade. And then she just didn't turn in the last project.

If you're missing 50% of your grade, you get an F. There's no way around it. There's nothing I can do to help.

But why? Why pay your money, put in fifteen weeks of work, and then just not submit the last thing you need to submit for your grade? Especially when that last thing was built into the structure of the class already, and wasn't going to require a whole lot of extra work on student's part? I swear it: she was already mostly there. If things got rough for her toward the end, she still could have faked it and turned in what she had done so far--and she'd have passed the class. But she didn't.

"Self-handicapping," as the NYT calls it, includes excuses like "Well, I didn't go to class," or "I stayed up all night partying before the final." But self-sabotage goes beyond the excuse. Students set up scenarios by which they will of necessity fail, thereby creating ready-made excuses for their poor performance later on. Not only does this protect the ego and one's sense of self-confidence, it also alleviates the need to improve oneself or make a change to get better. Interestingly, the NYT article noted that such students frequently ranked themselves among the top 10% of their colleagues, even though they achieved only C (or even lower) averages. Because they never took risks and never tried very hard, they were also able to assume that if they DID try harder, they'd be, well, brilliant.

It's just that no one knows it but them.

Sadly, such false assumptions ignore another phenomenon, however. Professors tend to "sandwich" grades. That means that the middle grades--Bs and Cs--actually account for a rather huge range of performances. Some of them really are Bs. But a lot of them aren't.

The problem is that we are guilt mongers. We feel sorry for poor performers--and even, perhaps, a little responsible for them. We don't want to stifle their confidence. And besides, what was it WE were doing that failed to motivate this person? Could it have been our fault that s/he performed so poorly?

So instead of failing a student whose performance doesn't measure up, we'll often give that student the lowest passing grade we can.

Self-sabotagers will never know this, though. They'll continue to do poorly, and continue to hobble their own chances at future success (and potentially their future happiness) by saving themselves the discomfort of ever knowing they might have done their best and still performed at an average level.

I guess the illusion of thinking you MIGHT be brilliant is worth never knowing for sure that you aren't.