logicandlanguage.net

I haven't yet encountered complaints like these. What gets me are the students who, after hardly showing up or doing much homework for the first 12 weeks, come to office hours and say, "I need an A in this course. What can I do to assure that I'll receive one?" The answer: "Nothing! Well, unless you have a time machine."

The best story I know was from a colleague then teaching at a State University in the US, who received a phone call while marking the exams. The young man on the phone said only the following before ringing off: "Hi, Professor. My girl-friend, X, is in your class, and she is not very bright. If she gets an A, I will draw the obvious conclusion and come beat you up."

My friend dug out X's exam paper, and found he'd already marked it. He'd given her a C. He decided he was not going to be intimidated in this way, so crossed out the C and wrote A.

He waited for the response from X's boyfriend. Nothing ever happened. Only as time went by did he realize he'd reacted exactly as the boyfriend had intended.

A recurring request I receive goes something like this: "If you give me (say) an A- instead of a B- it would help me get that graduate assistantship or that great job or that wonderful scholarship. Will you please please please..." I vaguely remember that John Hospers wrote about this sort of scenarios in his work on rule-utilitarianism.

Doesn't have much to do with the begging for grades aspect of the story, but with this part:

And then there's consumerism, he says. Pure and simple, tuition at a private college runs, on average, nearly $28,000 a year. If parents pay that much, they expect nothing less than A's in return. "Therefore, if the teacher gives you a B, that's not acceptable," says Levine, "because the teacher works for you. I expect A's, and if I'm getting B's, I'm not getting my money's worth."

A somewhat better model than that of commercial customer is that of professional client, in relation, for instance, to a doctor or lawyer. No one with any sense goes to their counselor and says: Prescribe this drug for me in this dosage, or file a lawsuit for me under this section of the Uniform Commercial Code (unless they know which code they have the best chance of winning the lawsuit under). One goes instead for access to a different kind of judgment and advice, which one wants to take account of a whole range of possibilities and constraints initially visible only to the professional.

The case of university-level instruction is even further out on this spectrum. What we have to offer is in no small part instruction about what sort of education the students should be pursuing, what is worth reading, learning, thinking and writing about — and what counts as doing that. The students come to us to become familiar with, and be held to standards of excellence of various sorts, as much as for our specific knowledge.

Sorry about the double post I forgot to sign in. Just delete the one which needs moderation.

Ugghh, I hate the end of term grade begging ritual.

The only students whose plight I am sympathetic towards (though I so far lack the power to do anything about it) are those who do well on the exams but are getting worse grades because of failure to do homework or other effort based measures. I feel that a grade should reflect a students mastery of the material and not some moral judgement about whether they put in sufficent work. Unfortunatly since at least American students are so babied through HS (and college) one can't expect them to self-motivate and thus must make HW (inappropriately) part of the grade lest the students don't work all term.

When I am finally in charge of course grading I will implement a policy that course grade is the better of the normal grade and one calculated entierly based on exams.

Also what really bugs me about this grade begging is how irrational and description specific it is. This term I found out that it is much better to tell students 'the cut off for an A was 91 but we rounded everyone with a 90.? up' than to just tell them 'there was a hard cut off at 90'. Even though both are entierly equivalent in the later students complain and beg because 'they were so close' while in the former they don't seem to begrudge the 'favor' you did for their classmates.

With reference to Richard's spectrum, which has retail at one end, lawyers and doctors somewhere in the middle and university teachers beyond that, I suppose the far end of the spectrum would be something like a diamond evaluator. His customer pays him solely for the evaluation, and you wouldn't expect a better evaluator to value the diamond more highly. We aren't like that. Our job is not merely evaluation. We try to help a bunch of people construct or improve their artifacts before evaluation. So I suppose we're more like...car mechanics...who specialise in getting kit cars that people build themselves to pass roadworthiness tests. Or something, I'm losing it here...

While kinda off topic people do go in to counselors and say that. I know I have done similar things. Doctor's and the like need to learn about all possible problems in their area of specilization and frankly aren't usually the best scholars in the world. Very few doctors read current research paper so it is pretty easy to go on pubmed and quickly know more about what is relevant to you than the doctor.

Doctors, and often corporate lawyers often are contacted to get them to pronounce some particular result. This is because their pronouncement has a special legal status (can write you a prescription). I find this state of affairs particularly annoying with respect to doctors as I need to pay money to get a doctor to tell me what I already know just because other people would behave stupidly if they could buy prescriptions with side effects over the counter.

I think we can just build on the diamond analogy. Teaching is like being a diamond cutter trying to get the most value out of the stone then evaluating it. Of course in any other field they would seperate the jobs of teaching and evaluating and I kinda think this should be done in education as well. There is an unfortunate tendency for egotistical professors to test whether or not the students paid attention to their wisdom rather than evaluating ability in the subject. I don't know how this would work in the humanities but it would be great for math. I think this is essentially how oxford/cambridge do things.