KISS Excellence Goodbye

I know I tend to be a stickler for detail but it seems as if our society has accepted mediocrity as the norm in our work and education environments. Is it wrong to circle the errors on the notes my children brought home from their teachers because I expected that teachers should set a good example to their students? Whatever happened to proof-reading their own work, especially if the teacher in question was the Advanced English class teacher? My children would complain about having to take these corrected and signed notes back to school, partly due to embarassment and partly due to fear of teacher retaliation. I tried to explain to them that it was the principle of the matter.

At my job in the healthcare field we have written policies and procedures. Sometimes when there is a breach of these policies and I try to report it as instructed I am treated like a tattletale who should mind her own business by the higher level managers, directors, and administrators. My feeling is that if they don't really expect that the policies will be followed then they should not have them or they should amend them. It is very frustrating to try to do a good job and follow the rules and then suffer the consequences. This is not just the principle of the matter, it is the legal and moral issue of the matter. I have read many publications over the years and attended enough seminars and education meetings to understand the implications.

Today after taking a test for my online coding class one of my answers was marked as incorrect when, in fact, it was not. There were two correct answers for the multiple choice question but I was instructed to only select one. Was it petty of me to email the instructor of the course and inform her of this error on the test that kept me from getting a 100%? I scored a 96% on the exam and I only have to obtain a score of 70% or higher to pass each module in the course so did it really matter? I considered just letting it go but I was aggravated that I would pay $1300.00 for this course in order to obtain a certificate for something I have already been doing for years on the job and the creators of the course could not even make sure that their exams are accurate. It was a simple medical terminology question. This does nothing to boost my confidence in the accuracy of the more complicated coding issues to be addressed in later modules.

I feel like a dinosaur in a world of complacency. The dumbing down to the lowest common denominator seems to be so much more acceptable in our society now than when I was younger. Somehow we have moved away from striving for excellence to just striving for fairly average. Once we are all just fairly average where do we go from there? I suppose the acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid) is more appropriate than one might think.