On the OU philosophy paper scandal

[donbosco]

Unlike my friend and the TA I would not have given the student a zero but rather would have called them in to discuss the essay. I would have learned a good deal then and likely could have done some teaching as well. I also would have counted on no support from administrators whatsoever. Other faculty would no doubt be sympathetic but similarly powerless in the same vein as I.

Dying on that hill by assigning a zero might show a specific kind of strict adherence to a principle about grades and grading but I have to question setting oneself up to die on that hill.

That kind of ‘death’ might be what one desires. Not me though.

 

[NOVAHEEL13]

The only class I've failed when busting my ass was Tax Law. JFC...I'm great with numbers and, until then, thought I had a solid understanding of how to write a legal essay but for whatever reason I did not learn the way the professor taught. I never blamed the professor though because it wasn't the professor's fault. Instead of bitching about how unfair it was I retook the class and got a B then moved on with life.

My GF is a HS teacher and her middle son is a PhD student at Mizzu and a TA. They both have said the quality of student's work has gone to shit in the last 5-7 years. All are entitled because (as someone said above) they EXPECT to get at least a D even if they don't do shit and when they get to college they are shocked when a professor or TA gives them the grades they actually deserve. This is probably because many of the Gen-X and older millinials thought the draconian grading systems were shit when we were in school so we SEVERLY overcorrected. This isn't simply a left-right thing, this happens in the bluest and the reddest areas so this is a socitial and generational failure.

 

[donbosco]

I’d posit that The Pandemic is by far the biggest factor in current student ideas about grades and grading.

 

[8992Tiger]

My bad grade came in "guns and boats" aka Military History 77 which was considered a slide course. Your grade was based upon 3 areas:

40% midterm exam and I received a B- grade which I considered unfair
20% seminar and I received a B which I considered a fair grade
40% final exam and I received an F which mystified me but I rationalized that I was tripping on LSD the night before the exam

so 60% of my grade was a B and 40% of my grade was an F . I expected to receive a C for my final grade but I flunked the class with an F as my final grade.

I was the victim of fuzzy math

With all due respect, I think you were the victim of LSD.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

Its why I preferred math and science in school. In most cases, the answers were either right or wrong. You didn't need to rely on someone's subjective opinion to get a grade.

Then you get out in the real world and you need to figure out quickly that someone's subjective opinion is what is most important in your life.

 

[farce©]

My GF is a HS teacher and her middle son is a PhD student at Mizzu and a TA. They both have said the quality of student's work has gone to shit in the last 5-7 years. All are entitled because (as someone said above) they EXPECT to get at least a D even if they don't do shit and when they get to college they are shocked when a professor or TA gives them the grades they actually deserve. This is probably because many of the Gen-X and older millinials thought the draconian grading systems were shit when we were in school so we SEVERLY overcorrected. This isn't simply a left-right thing, this happens in the bluest and the reddest areas so this is a socitial and generational failure.

I’m convinced it is a product the allocation of funds to school systems based on “performance.” While it might be better to give kids the grades they deserve, it also cuts funding. Schools will figure out a way to game the system to qualify for the funds they need. If they base it on graduation rates they will push kids through and graduate a bunch of kids who know nothing. This is the result of years of state legislatures meddling in education at a micro level, plus federal mandates to mainstream special needs kids no matter how disruptive it is to the classroom process.

 

[uncleradar]

I was called before a professor and accused of cheating on a chemistry exam. I had drawn a ridiculous comic stick figure as the answer to a problem ( I had no idea of the correct answer). The professor showed me another exam with a nearly identical stick figure drawn for the same problem. The professor informed me that the penalty for cheating was an "F", dismissal from class and a referral to Honor Court. The professor was famous for his bad attitude; I was a dumb country kid. As I was leaving- humiliated and crying- I remembered that the exam had assigned seats. The professor had not been present for the exam- it was proctored by a grad student. I asked where the other student had been sitting. He was behind me to my left. There was a sudden shift in the power dynamic.

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

As long as we are talking about our own personal bad grades, OUSooner, I think you will especially appreciate this if your "EE" means electrical engineering.

I was a Mech Engr major. Back in the day, we took a DC circuits class and an AC circuits class. Now be aware that this is pretty basic stuff, so the DC class wasn't very hard. I got an A. In fact, I did pretty well in school; I and my friend group usually got A's. So in AC circuits, before our TA handed back our first test, he wrote the grades the board (not names) so we would have an idea of the distribution. When he got to the bottom, I remember thinking, "Damn, I'd hate to be the guy with the 25." Well, guess who got the 25? With only four tests for the year, I knew I would have to be lucky to get a B, so I went to his office and asked if he could schedule the next test before drop/add. Instead, he scheduled it the day after, so I punted. Everyone in my friend group kept the class, but the final dropped their class grade by a full letter, and these were guys who finished school with 3.7-3.8 GPAs. (Clemson did not award fractional points - an A-, A, and A+ were all 4 points.) Anyway, next semester I got a different TA for AC. His first comment was, "OK, I know you guys are Mechanical Engineering majors, so this won't be too bad." What a great guy!

I still don't believe all of that AC stuff. I think it is some kind of weird magic.

I was electrical engineering.

Was the magic the phasor stuff? AC analysis makes heavy use of Euler’s formula which certainly looks like magic when you first encounter it. Then it is like everything is done in the frequency domain.

The funny thing is that with some things I have gained a deeper understanding over the years even though I do no EE. Like I was never 100% convinced that the whole treatment of Euler’s formula was valid though I obviously knew it was. Specifically the validity of dropping the imaginary part at the end seemed troubling but really only because the circuit textbook was not a math textbook and didn’t fully investigate the validity of that step. Later I learned that you can prove that that is valid as long as the elements are linear.

Just little things that are fundamental that you don’t always have the time to dig super deep - unless you are just super smart and can absorb it quickly.

 

[05C40]

I was called before a professor and accused of cheating on a chemistry exam. I had drawn a ridiculous comic stick figure as the answer to a problem ( I had no idea of the correct answer). The professor showed me another exam with a nearly identical stick figure drawn for the same problem. The professor informed me that the penalty for cheating was an "F", dismissal from class and a referral to Honor Court. The professor was famous for his bad attitude; I was a dumb country kid. As I was leaving- humiliated and crying- I remembered that the exam had assigned seats. The professor had not been present for the exam- it was proctored by a grad student. I asked where the other student had been sitting. He was behind me to my left. There was a sudden shift in the power dynamic.

In a very difficult class (chemical thermodynamics) where I was dreading the mid-term exam, it was everything that I was dreading. It was an open book exam. Doing it was like walking through hip deep mud. I got to the final question and realized the professor had made a mistake and I could just read the answer off a graph in the book. So I wrote the answer down and thought, "I need to do more than this." So I drew a crude version of graph, added horizontal and vertical lines showing how I got the number, and drew an arrow from my answer to the graph, just as the teacher said "Time's up, hand in your papers." The next class the teacher was going over the answers and when got the question above, said something like, "I was not expecting a final answer in this question, only that you would set up the interative process to eventually arrive at the answer. But one student saw I had overspecified the question and just got the correct answer off the graph in the book," in a tone of voice that suggested I had some how cheated. What a f$%#king piece of work. On the final exam he did something equally stupid, but I won't bore you with that. I never had a class I hated more that I got an "A" in.

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

I was called before a professor and accused of cheating on a chemistry exam. I had drawn a ridiculous comic stick figure as the answer to a problem ( I had no idea of the correct answer). The professor showed me another exam with a nearly identical stick figure drawn for the same problem. The professor informed me that the penalty for cheating was an "F", dismissal from class and a referral to Honor Court. The professor was famous for his bad attitude; I was a dumb country kid. As I was leaving- humiliated and crying- I remembered that the exam had assigned seats. The professor had not been present for the exam- it was proctored by a grad student. I asked where the other student had been sitting. He was behind me to my left. There was a sudden shift in the power dynamic.

That is a crazy story. I am glad you were able to figure that out.

My instinct is that I would have jumped all over the teacher after that reveal and demanded an apology. But I know I wouldn’t have.

The professor I referred to was notorious. Little things like drawing a phasor diagram with then components not ordered correctly was a zero. While it reveals the correct answer, it doesn’t show the correct intermediate answers which isn’t what was being asked. Getting a sign of a voltage drop across a resistor backwards is a sign you don’t understand basic concepts and thus deserve no partial credit. (That is an absurd assumption as any EE student knows this but humans still make mistakes.). No calculators were allowed which can play with your mind even if problem is designed to be solveable without a calculator. (He made use of well known triangles to avoid some trig.)

In electronics there is a standard on use of upper case and lowercase variables and subscripts. No credit if you got that wrong because the answer you got implied DC when it is in fact AC so it’s entirely 100% wrong.

That is why I found the common denominator. I was so freaked out about not doing every little thing like he expected.

The prof was a Polish Jew and spent a couple of years in Auschwitz. He lived because he learned some electrician work from a course he took at about 12 years old. When they were put on trains to be moved away from the advancing Russians, he by chance was put in an open air coal cart. They suspected what awaited them and four of them jump off the train into snow in the middle of the night and was recaptured a couple of days later but the Soviets overran the them the next night.

The holocaust museum in DC has an audio interview documenting it. It is fascinating but the one thing I noticed is that he was kind of a dick to the interviewer who dared to ask questions like “did you have a pillow or a blanket” and used the word hung instead of hanged which he had to correct for no good reason.

But the point is that this guy rightly didn’t give a damn about the perceived slights of 19 year olds.

 

[superrific]

Y'all, I once got a 15/100 on an exam, which was a solid A and the second highest score in the class. The mean was like -11 or something.

 

[superrific]

Unlike my friend and the TA I would not have given the student a zero but rather would have called them in to discuss the essay.

I would have recused myself and let the instructor grade that one.

 

[8992Tiger]

I was electrical engineering.

Was the magic the phasor stuff? AC analysis makes heavy use of Euler’s formula which certainly looks like magic when you first encounter it. Then it is like everything is done in the frequency domain.

The funny thing is that with some things I have gained a deeper understanding over the years even though I do no EE. Like I was never 100% convinced that the whole treatment of Euler’s formula was valid though I obviously knew it was. Specifically the validity of dropping the imaginary part at the end seemed troubling but really only because the circuit textbook was not a math textbook and didn’t fully investigate the validity of that step. Later I learned that you can prove that that is valid as long as the elements are linear.

Just little things that are fundamental that you don’t always have the time to dig super deep - unless you are just super smart and can absorb it quickly.

No. You are going way deeper than I can for electrical stuff. I don't recall any discussion of euler's formula in our AC circuit class, nor do I recall any work in the frequency domain. Again, it was pretty basic. Our first real work in the frequency domain was in classical controls, which was either after AC or roughly concurrent. In either case, AC wasn't where we learned it. That reminds me of one of my academic regrets; I wish I had taken vibrations.

 

[Wolfslayer]

One aspect not mentioned much is the fact that many high schools do not give 0s even for no submission.

Many student expect to receive a 60 even if they didn’t turn anything in!

Getting an actual 0 when you turned something in feels impossible and shocking to these students.

I had a student look into my eyes like I had kicked his cat and muttered “Man, those zeros” shaking his head slowly walking away after submitting a quiz grade recently.

We have to give at least a 50 for the 1st semester. After that we can give 0's.

 

[Blurb]

We have to give at least a 50 for the 1st semester. After that we can give 0's.

That’s interesting. What level do you teach?

I’ve embraced a bit of a Pavlovian approach where I give them immediate 0s on their missed work in the first/second week of class with no makeups. It craters their overall average in the LMS, which at that point is meaningless given over 98% of the work is yet to come, but tends to wake up some students about the consequences of missing work.

 

[GoHeelsweeeehoooo]

I took a geology class at UNC and the professor let us set the curve - I had made 50's on all the exams and ended up with a B

 

[donbosco]

I would have recused myself and let the instructor grade that one.

That's a solid answer. I'm not sure that was possible in this specific case though. Wasn't the TA the instructor?

 

[Blurb]

For no submission one should get a zero.

If one does some work I can understand not getting a zero, no matter how bad.

That’s my view as well. I’ve never given a student a zero on a bad essay no matter how bad absent cheating. An F is fine for me too.

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

Y'all, I once got a 15/100 on an exam, which was a solid A and the second highest score in the class. The mean was like -11 or something.

Yes that happens. I think the 17/100 was a median score but I felt that I understood the material and deserved a far better score. As I said, I left thinking I had gotten at least 3/4 questions correct. I do not remember the details of the other ones. I probably made a mistake somewhere but if he gave me zero credit for a question I answered 100% correct before finding a common denominator, it wasn’t worth fighting over questions that I did make mistakes on prior to getting the correct answer.

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

That’s my view as well. I’ve never given a student a zero on a bad essay no matter how bad absent cheating. An F is fine for me too.

But is the distinction between a 0% and a 20% which is clearly a judgement call worth the firing of a TA?

Is that really where we are? Would anyone argue over such things if 1) the Bible was not referenced and 2) the TA was not trans?

Even if there was a wrong (which is debatable), is the remedy appropriate?

I don’t think anyone could argue that it was.