My university somewhat recently started offering these for credit seminars that first years are given the opportunity to take for some paltry amount of credit. I like the idea in general since it gives the faculty an opportunity to teach stuff we might not ordinarily get to teach. I took one of these at my fancy SLAC my first year and learned a lot of cool stuff I'd have not been able to enjoy otherwise. So, of course, I'd jump at the opportunity to teach one of these.
During the term I had my students write several papers. Nobody actually believes that math and writing are very much done together. So one of my goals has been to introduce students to this concept. Where math and a traditional English course differ (at least from the perspective of a mathy) is that in English you must synthesize your own ideas and write the argument but in math often you can't synthesize the idea without the help of others. My students were to work together to find the correct argument and then write their own papers conveying how well that they understood the argument.
All but a handful of students wrote their own papers. Two students (a subset of one of the groups) decided to submit identical papers. Well, the order of names at the top of the papers were different. Everything else was the same. The margins, spacing, font, sentences .... everything.
University policy to award F's to those papers which have been plagiarized. So that's what I did.
Final grades have been submitted. Graduation is just days away. This morning I opened my email to read this gem (wording and names changed to protect the guilty):
"Hi. This is Joey. I was looking my grades and I saw that I have a 79%. I was wondering if you'd be willing to give me a B since I'm only one point away and the only reason that I don't have a B is because you gave me an F on that paper I copied. I'm not arguing with your decision but I need a B to keep my scholarship."
Now Joey doesn't actually have a 79%. He has a 78.7% and a B starts at 80%. So he's more than one point away from a B but my public policy is that if there is a one point difference between your grade and the next higher one then I may consider the higher course score so long as you abide by the classroom policies. But only students who have regularly come to office hours or have outstanding scores on all but one aspect of the course grade are likely to earn the bump.
I'm not sure what is more funny. That Joey thinks that he can lie about to a numbers person about his final percentage or thinks that the argument that he'd have had a B if he hadn't plagiarized would entice me to bump him to the next higher letter grade.
I love that he just outright admits it, too. I would never give him a B, but be prepared for the, "you've ruined my life" emails.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the humor of this type of student request, but at the same time, I always think of the student who was second in line for the scholarship that the cheating/slacking/dumb/etc student got instead.
ReplyDeleteI love the one point away thing myself. If 80 is the cut off, but students who are one point away, can also be awarded a B, then the cutoff is really 79, so the student who got 78 is one point away.
ReplyDeleteI love the one point away thing myself. If 80 is the cut off, but students who are one point away, can also be awarded a B, then the cutoff is really 79, so the student who got 78 is one point away.
ReplyDeleteWhere I am, one's department head won't approve a final mark of 79 since that inevitably prompts an appeal. It's 78 or 80. Of course, sometimes to get the former one has to do some retroactive fudging....
ReplyDelete@Gauss - I hate that too. We round to the nearest integer, so students with 79.2 are always saying how they were 'less than half a point from the cutoff'. Aaaargh! I figure each final score has at least a 1% margin of error either way, but curiously, nobody ever complains when they get 80.3%.
ReplyDeleteThe whole thing could be solved at a stroke by getting rid of letter grades. Then there'd be no cutoffs to whine about, and we'd just grade on a continuous scale from zero to 100. The absurdity is that once the registrar makes us group percentage scores into bins with letters they go and (wait for it...) assign numerical values to the letters to calculate a grade point average!!!
Die Letter Grades! Die!
Letter grades must die. Agreed. When your class is one of the gateway prerequisites for admission to med school, you better believe all those meds keeners are gunning for an A+ [and actually, they need an A+ for a hope in hell of getting a spot in med school], and although an 89 does actually represent a lot better performance than an 81, they both end up as an A, so in my experience anything above an 87.5 means I'll have the student breaking down my door looking for some way (oh yes, I've been offered "that" way) to get the mark to a 89.5 (which then gets rounded to 90 and voila, an A+!).
ReplyDeleteYES. I LOVE CM for the comment like this: Letter grades must die!
ReplyDeleteWe're encouraged to give points that we must then "translate" to letter grades that are then translated to a gpa!
We use +/- grades, and in my experience, the difference between a B- and a B (which affects the semester gpa significantly) makes little difference after a student finishes her forty-plus courses.
Wait a minute...how on Earth is a 89.anything an A+?? What, then, does one *call* grades that range between 91 and 99.999(100)?
ReplyDeleteSweet Jebus on a pogo stick, my school went to numeric grades ('YAY!), but previously 90s were aspects of A, 80s of B, 70s of C, 64.49-69.48 of D, and "below 65" was failing.
(The only real befuddlement we get from students now are those recently immigrated from Middle Eastern/Asian countries who do not understand why they are failing with, for example, a 43? Apparently, in much of that side of the planet, "failing is below 35.)