Honors Students

As I was grading papers, I started to get this weird sense that all my non-honors students were doing better than my honors students. At first I thought it must be my bias, ie I must be grading the former more easily because I'm expecting less of them, but then I remembered that their midterm scores went through the roof: the lowest score was 88, and most of the class was at 95+.

I guess it makes sense at an instituion with selective admissions. Non-honors here doesn't mean remedial like it used to in grade school, it just means that they aren't quite as type-A. And in order for a non-type-A student to be performing at the same caliber as the type-A student, she or he must be inherently brighter, right? My experience with the papers seems to confirm as much. I often feel when I'm grading some of these honors papers that I'm giving too much credit to their regurgitative mediocrity because I know that their grades mean a lot to them and they try really hard and I feel bad for them. Like if it's basically grammatical and they participate a lot, I'll give them a frickin B+. Sigh. It's true that there are some real lemons in the non-honors batch (as there are in the honors batch), but on the whole I seem to discern a marked difference in the quality of their ideas.

Suddenly I feel this hostility toward those type-A kids. Are they really going to coast through life by hyperventiliating all the time and eliciting the grader's sympathy? That doesn't seem fair.