Are the results being inflated?

I saw a young friend yesterday and she proudly showed me something she had done at school. 

"I got a gold star!" she told me. I told her I was pleased she had a gold star but when she went off to play her mother told me something which disturbed me.

"Everyone got a gold star." 

We both agreed that this was wrong. Her daughter's work was good but it was not outstanding. She is not yet old enough to really understand what the "gold star" meant.

Apparently you no longer give gold stars for outstanding work or outstanding effort. Everyone gets a gold star. You all "win".  I actually thought her school had stopped giving out such "awards" but apparently not. 

I did not give out gold stars to my year 6 class. Back then they were, on average, a year younger than they are now but they did not want gold stars. We actually talked about how I might reward them for extra effort and the most popular suggestion was "tell my Mum about it". I did tell their parents about it. I wrote a note home for one boy one day. He had been really struggling with something. His father, a policeman, was not very sympathetic towards his son. The following day however he turned up (in uniform) and told me how much he had appreciated being told his son had put so much effort in. For the rest of the year that child worked so hard.

I went on to have a conversation with first the mother of the little girl and then her father when he came inside. We agreed that the results children now get are being inflated with praise. There seems to be a constant flow of words like "good job" for the most average of efforts. 

I know I always being told I could "do better than that". My brother agrees. (We talked about this last night when he called me about something else.) We remember the gold and silver or the coloured stars at school. They were something special. They were something we worked to try and achieve.

On top of that there seems to be another trend. There is a trend to give students higher up school and into university better results than they actually deserve. I have marked many essays for students and have been told all too frequently that my assessments of their work are too low.  I have even been told, "You can't fail anyone." The students have complained I am "too tough".  Is it really too tough to expect an essay which shows evidence of having read the required text, thought about the problem and given the answer some sort of structure? Is it too much to expect the ability to write a sentence and spell the words correctly? Why should I give a Credit to something which is not worthy of it?  Thankfully I no longer mark papers on a regular basis. It was a constant worry.

We don't need constant approval. Even as children we should be working for gold stars not merely being given them.