The dawn of the 21st century brought a surplus of millennial college students to colleges and universities. With this surplus, professors noticed a major change in the attitudes of students and how they felt about their roles in learning and their responsibilities. Faculty became aware that these new students saw college work, which is meant to be difficult, as too hard, and thus the discussion of academic entitlement was constructed. Entitlement is defined as “unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations” (American Psychological Association, 2000). In the world of academia, academic entitlement is the unreasonable expectation that a student should receive good grades simply for showing up to class and completing assignments, rather than for producing good quality work. Recent research has hypothesized variables that could potentially produce individual or group differences in academic entitlement (AE). Some research has found that academic entitlement is higher among males than females, but this research has not attempted to distinguish between biological sex and gender roles. This research focuses on distinguishing sex from gender roles and comparing them to AE by administering a gender roles questionnaire (the Bem Sex Role Inventory, Mindgarden Publishers), as well as the Academic Entitlement Questionnaire (Kopp et al, 2011). Along with these questionnaires, this research uses the Academic Locus of Control Scale (Curtis & Trice, 2013) to test locus of control in accordance with academic entitlement. Recent research has suggested that locus of control may play a part in AE and this research attempts to clarify the correlation.
