WE'VE BEEN WORKING our way, one or two sentences at a time, through a piece of email propaganda, a short story about an Economics Professor, sent out over the internet. You can read the complete version in the first part, and my previous commentary there, and in part two.
We've come as far as the following line:
After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.
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Unless this is a graduate level class, B is too high an average.
In fact, the current undergraduate catalog at Texas Tech defines a 'C' as "average". The professor is either grading erratically, or is setting the class up, in order to prove his point. -
If it is a graduate level class, then the rest of the story is even more unbelievable, for reasons which I'll explain when we get there.
The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
This seems easy enough to believe, until you really think about it:
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If this had actually happened, I can believe the first part. A student who worked hard for a grade could be really upset when he or she didn't get it.
Oh. Except, of course, they already knew what the rules were, so, if they worked hard anyway, it wasn't for the grade! -
There's no way you'll get me to believe the second part. Or, to be more precise, there's no way I'll believe the implication in the subtext of the second part, because I have real first-hand evidence.
In saying that "the students who studied little were happy", the author doesn't mean that they were pleased because the grade pressure was lifted and they could concentrate on learning, or that they were pleased because of their gratitude for the superior abilities of the better students.
Neither of those would further the argument in the email.
What the author intends us to believe is that the students who had studied little were pleased that they were getting a better grade than they deserved.
When I taught high school, I did a little grading experiment myself one year. I told my class that at the end of each grading period they would be grading themselves.
I reserved the right to change the grade they assigned themselves only in extreme cases, like students who turned nothing in all quarter then gave themselves an 'A'. But other than that I would go with the grade they thought they earned.
The result surprised even me. I had, of course, kept track of their progress privately, and I knew what grade they would have earned from me.
(The fact was that I regretted having announced the policy, and I was getting ready to take it back if it was a total failure.)
The surprises were of two kinds: -
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First, I only had to change about 10% of the grades. About 90% were already exactly what I would have assigned anyway.
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Second, the grades I questioned—the ones I wanted to change—were, in all but one case, lower than the ones I would have given.
In two cases, after much discussion, I compromised and gave students the average of my, higher, evaluation and their, lower, one, because they refused to accept my higher evaluation.
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So I simply don't believe that students who got higher grades than they deserved were uniformly pleased with that fact. And, I might point out, this is important to the argument which has been expertly placed in the subtext.
I might also add that this example doesn't come from some anonymous professor, contriving a situation to prove a point. I was there, you know my name, and the students' reaction was not what I expected.
Next time...
But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little...
To be continued...
