My first week at work as a field engineer in Louisiana, I was put in a fake helicopter, dumped upside down in a pool and forced to swim out the window to practice escaping a helicopter crash. Over a series of four to five simulated crashes, more complexity is added to increase the difficulty. When I took too long on my third escape (after getting my life jacket caught on the seat belt and finding myself quickly running out of air), I was required to get back in and repeat the exercise until I did it right. And the people who didn’t know how to swim? They were right there next to me, held to the same standards.

My first week at the Stanford GSB, a group of my peers complained to the Academic Dean that a three-minute quiz was too difficult. The response? An extra minute on future quizzes and an apology from the instructor that she couldn’t make the questions easier. 

One of these experiences taught me to push through challenges. The other taught me that with a little bit of noise, I could avoid difficulty entirely. Stanford is supposed to be a place where people learn to change the world, but my first week gravely concerned me. Changing the world is hard. Why was Stanford letting us off easy?

In a graduate-level class outside of the business school, I submitted what might be the worst written presentation of my entire life. My undergraduate professors would’ve rejected it as incomplete. When the grading notification came, I felt a rush of dread as I went to check it — 82 percent! — well above what I expected, and quite frankly, far above what I deserved.

It’s not just the well-known prevalence of grade inflation at elite universities (roughly 80 percent of grades given out at Yale are A’s and Harvard’s average GPA is a 3.80) or that 47 percent of tenured professors agree that academic standards have declined in recent years. It’s also the lack of consequences that spare students from ever facing accountability. During a particularly busy week, I missed the deadline to take a quiz. The next day, I emailed the Teaching Assistant (TA), who promptly reopened the quiz for me without any penalty to my grade. A friend realized she had scheduled a flight the same time as her in-person final. She was allowed to take the exam when she returned – a full month later – and got one of the highest grades in the class. How will students take deadlines at work seriously when Stanford treats academic deadlines as suggestions? 

Some might argue that these relaxed policies are meant to support student well-being. And certainly there are legitimate reasons for exceptions to occasionally be made. But the real world doesn’t give you an A for effort, adjust deadlines because you have a busy week or allow you the day off because you’re feeling stressed. It demands performance even when things are hard, and universities that fail to instill this mindset are setting their students up for failure. It’s much better for students to learn something the hard way while at school, where the worst punishment is a bad grade, than by being fired from their dream job.

It’s unsurprising to me that the Stanford classes I’ve learned the most in are the ones some students advise against taking because they are too much work, or the professor is mean or the grading is too harsh. Having high standards, and holding people accountable for not meeting them, drives results. 

I get it — many professors come to Stanford to do world-class research, not to teach. Many TAs are just trying to fulfill a degree requirement or earn a bit of cash. I’m sure the last thing they want to deal with is an argument with an upset student, so it’s easier to just make an exception to a rule. But the public will judge Stanford on the performance of its graduates, and a horde of young workers missing deadlines and expecting special treatment will not be good for Stanford’s reputation. 

My ask to professors and TAs is to show students what excellence looks like. Set standards you would expect from a high performer at work. Hold to those standards in all but exceptional cases. And administrators, back the professors up when the inevitable complaints come. 

Stanford is supposed to be one of the best universities in the world. If we don’t demand excellence here, why should we expect it anywhere else?

Amanda Studebaker is a second-year MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-COO of the MBA Student Association.