What's fair? A letter to a student
by Leigh Pomeroy
I happen to teach a large film class. This semester I ended up with over 240 students and received help from a graduate student only during the test sessions.
One of the greatest challenges of being a college teacher today is dealing with plagiarism and cheating. The dishonest students make up maybe 10% of the class — Oh? You're surprised at this number? — but all too often they take up 50% of the time. Being a college professor today means being one-half cop.
Academic dishonesty aside, the end of the semester also brings challenges from students who are unhappy with their grades. Here is a letter I received from one:
I happen to teach a large film class. This semester I ended up with over 240 students and received help from a graduate student only during the test sessions.
One of the greatest challenges of being a college teacher today is dealing with plagiarism and cheating. The dishonest students make up maybe 10% of the class — Oh? You're surprised at this number? — but all too often they take up 50% of the time. Being a college professor today means being one-half cop.
Academic dishonesty aside, the end of the semester also brings challenges from students who are unhappy with their grades. Here is a letter I received from one:
So I will be recieving [sic] a B for my grade? I am willing to do anything and I think that is completely unfair. One of my friends made it to a total of probably 3 of your classes and he will be getting a low B. I will have missed it by half of a point and I have made it to every class, did every assignment, did the extra credit, and retook the final. Every test I made notecards and studied before every test unlike a lot of people that are really good at tests. I am not the best at tests but I did everthing [sic] I could as far as the homework. So there is no way I can get .5 percent to get an A?Because she was insistent and did do all the written assignments particularly well, I relented, rescored one of her assignments, and gave her an "A". But her comment about "fairness" struck me about how so many of today's college students feel entitled. So I typed out the response below and sent it to her by email:
OK. I raised your grade [by one point on the first assignment], basically taking away the penalty for being late. (It was, in fact, very well done.) That gives you a 90 for the course.Hopefully, the fact that she got an A instead of a B in a survey film class will become less important than developing an idea about what really counts in the world.
As for fairness...
1. It is probably unfair that the +/- system of grading is currently optional. If students want the +/- system they should forcefully advocate for it. As I have mentioned in class and in the study session, students should challenge faculty and administration to do a better job.
2. It is definitely unfair if you are a child born in Haiti as opposed to being a child born in the U.S. Midwest, especially when you have to deal with a horrendous earthquake.
3. It is definitely unfair if you are a child born in Africa to a mother with HIV/AIDS and on top of that have to live on less than $1 a day and trek five miles for water.
4. It is definitely unfair to be a child born into the Harijan caste in India and be termed an untouchable all your life.
5. It is definitely unfair to be born a female in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or any number of other countries in the world where women are 2nd class citizens.
6. It is definitely unfair to be a college student today knowing that by the time you are 60 years old there will be 9.2 billion people on the planet, 74% more than the 5.3 billion living in the world the year you were born.
7. It is definitely unfair to be a college student today knowing that your parents' and grandparents' generations have lived high on the hog wasting resources, running up debt (putting your retirement at risk), despoiling the environment, and pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere that by the time you are 60 Minnesota may have the weather of Kansas and Kansas the weather of Mexico.
Need I go on?
Prof P
Labels: college, fairness, university
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2 Comments:
Why is the instructor becoming the culprit ?
Is “Effort” being confused with “Accomplishment” ?
It’s called LIFE and it ain’t fair … in business, in completing performance reviews, one of my standard question was : “What did you do personally to make our company more profitable, a better place to work, and more efficient ?” The typical response was I came to work on time … my typical response was “That’s assumed … otherwise I would be firing you … now, what did you Accomplish that improved our operation?”
Should the question be asked, “Is it fair to the other students who did legitimately earned an “A” to have your records be re-evaluated and “Tweaked” for your benefit ?”
Did the problem start in T-ball where everybody must get a “Winner’s Ribbon” ?
If the discussion concerns fairness, it is unfair for the instructor who now shifts the focus from rewarding grades based on Accomplishment to considering if the complaining student will be impacted psychologically.
When my wife taught Freshman English at The Ohio State University, they had a simple rule … after the first five errors, stop grading … the student failed. Of course, that was during the Vietnam era and flushing out students was one way to manage enrollment demands.
(BTW, there is nothing scarier than getting a love note sent back marked in red with all my errors … but she married me anyway. So, in school I was a loser, but in Life, I was a winner.)
I dealt with the same issues when I was teaching college math and physics at Barton Count CC in Great Bend, KS. Whenever students whined to me about fairness I told them first to grow up - only 9 year olds whine about fairness - and second you as a student 'earn' a grade; I as the teacher did not 'give' grades.
I liked your point about the student in question sense of 'entitlement' - that through mere effort rather than results was what, in her mind, was deserving of a higher grade. She also made the mistake of comparing her effort to that of another student. If that is a criteria for a grade, then shouldn't everyone just get an 'A'? The fact that she did 'extra credit' and 'retook the final' reinforces my belief that she earned a 'B'. Academia and the working world have very little in common - fairness, reset buttons, working hard rather than working smart do not accumulate points. The only measuring stick is success and success is measured by how much you benefit the company relative to what it costs to employ you (of course, that is not the case in the public sector, but I digress).
Anyone remember the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in 1942? Turns out the engineer missed a minus sign in the calculation so that the design resulted in an increasing harmonic function rather than a decreasing harmonic function. Imagine that same engineer today complaining that he should have earned 95% on the harmonic function problem because he only missed a minus sign! Who among us wants to go to a doctor that had to retake 'the final' and had to beg for an increased grade to get in to med school?!
I think you should have judged her grade as a 'B' which would have done more to reinforce what counts. Now, she probably thinks begging, waxing about fairness in judgement in comparison to others is what matters. Also, I concur with MacPherson's analysis of the situation.
Nevertheless, this was a good story, Leigh. Thanks for sharing it.
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