The whole grade for the best product versus the best effort dilemma is made especially difficult by the life-altering competitiveness of getting into the "good" college, and thereby tracking a whole life/career path, etc. I'm ashamed to say that I supported my internship years by writing papers for rich kids to get into (and then stay afloat in) universities far more prestigious than my own and paid for by their parents with notes attached like, "Johnny is having a little trouble with his English teacher, and he's going to be pre-med at Princeton: he needs an A." Well, when they would bother to send a rough draft, it would turn out that Johnny didn't have so much a problem with his teacher as he did with spelling, punctuation and rudimentary reading comprehension. Did you ever wonder how the foreign engineering major who could barely string enough English together to ask where the dining hall was managed to get through the general education requirements? Daddy's credit card and dummies like me who are still too young and naive to realize the societal damage they're doing. Seriously, if the teachers, professors, etc paid a little more attention to the individual capabilities and learning arcs of their students, they would impart more knowledge and they would be able to detect the discrepancy between the Master's level analysis of Yeats and the high school student whose last essay was entitled "Why Poems Are Bitchen" who turns it in. And don't get me started on how the low pay coupled with the need to put warm bodies in front of swollen classrooms (at least in California) is resulting in the blind leading the blind - you'd be disgusted by how many of my clients were education majors working on their credentials.