You really can’t answer that one yourself?
I mean, not if you can’t answer yours yourself.
The answer to mine is that no one is harmed. If you think someone is, then let me know.
Who is harmed by giving the student an A when he asks for it? He just wants an A, what the hell is the big deal. It would really help him out.
So your answer is no one is harmed?
No, I’m asking you if anyone is harmed if everyone who asks for an A gets an A.
I’ve typed and retyped different responses, but I think my stance is that it’s a matter of integrity. This isn’t a retail transaction where the student is purchasing a letter grade with their tuition. I think grades are important, and I don’t believe it’s appropriate to manipulate them.
I’m trying to think about this in other settings, where manipulating things in one direction would be obviously harmful to someone (like Keeed’s dumb example), but the other direction isn’t as obviously harmful.
Here’s what I came up with:
- Someone interested in purchasing a home needs an appraisal for the loan, and they tell the appraiser “Hey, whatever your true appraisal is, lower it by $30,000.”
- A fitness instructor is monitoring someone at the gym for [imagine some stupid scenario] and the individual says “Hey, I know that I’ve been coming to the gym 5 days a week for the last month, but can you write down that I wasn’t that consistent?”
- A credit rating agency is asked by the rated firm to issue a lower-than-warranted rating.
I think all of these cases are analogous, in that the individual is asking for manipulating that’s opposite from the obviously-harmful manipulation. But in each case, I still think the ethical thing to do is give what you believe is the fair and appropriate rating.
I don’t know, my default is “No, I’m not going to intentionally manipulate something.”
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Yeah, we got that. I asked if you couldn’t answer it yourself. You said that you couldn’t if I couldn’t answer my question myself. But I could and did. So, again, can’t you just answer this one for yourself. It’s not that hard.
I’m interested in your answer to the question. You obviously won’t answer it because it makes your position look dumb so carry on, guy.
Because the obvious point I’m making is that the same people are harmed in both cases, but you’re not willing to defend giving everyone As.
I don’t think that integrity is really affected if your policy is specified to everyone in advance. Then it just becomes part of the system.
Here’s how I see it. Imagine that your grade in a class is determined by one test that consisting of 100 points. I figure that the student can do whatever they want with the points they earn. If they earned 97 points, then they can apply that to their grade (default) or if they decide to sacrifice 10 of them and ask for a B, then that’s fine. They earned the points, so if they want to do something that doesn’t really harm anyone else, I’m good with it.
I guess if you wouldn’t agree with it in normal times, then I understand why you wouldn’t agree in COVID times.
I generally don’t think you’re trolling nearly as much as other people, but this seems like a bizarre line of questioning.
If I give a student an undeserved A, that cheapens the earned As for everyone else in the class. There’s obvious harm. Maybe minor, but it slightly tarnishes the value of an A.
If I give a student an undeserved D (versus the deserved C), that doesn’t cheapen anyone else’s grade. (This is assuming that the D does count towards GPA and isn’t converted to a Pass, which is what Melkerson is assuming.) So it’s unclear who’s being hurt.
The two situations seem obviously very different.
Well, instead of me trying to guess at your point, why don’t you use your words.
Clearly we both agree that giving someone a higher grade than deserved would harm others. Our difference of opinion is that giving someone a lower grade than they deserved would harm others. I say it doesn’t. You seem to think it does. So just post who and how. This shouldn’t be that hard.
Not sure what the bolded means. I definitely don’t believe that a student should be able to donate points they’ve earned to another student.
More importantly, I finally thought of a contrived scenario where this grade request would make sense:
A rich student’s poor friend is right at the margin for getting a huge scholarship. If the poor friend finishes in the top 10% of the graduating class, they get the scholarship. The rich student is one spot ahead of the poor student based on the earned grades in my class, but would flip spots if the rich student voluntarily dropped the grade in my class from a B to a D. If I knew that was the scenario, I definitely would not lower the rich kid’s grade in order to manipulate the scholarship outcome.
Yeah, I agree with that. I actually thought about specifically addressing that scenario, but I thought this covered it, so I didn’t type more:
With that restriction, really the only things they can do is have them counted or have them not counted. I can’t think of anything else.
I thought we were talking about letting the student ask for a D, which is essentially letting any student convert their grade to pass/fail at any time, right? GPAs at different schools mean different things to institutions that pay attention to GPA. Such a policy would drive up GPAs and cheapen As even if the same number of As was being given out. Because such a practice would become known and generally tarnish the academic reputation of the school or program. I guess that they could request a transcript and see how many pass/fails you got, but that’s a lot to expect.
Such a policy hurts a student actually taking a course pass/fail most, because they’re going to assume they pulled the D maneuver when they might just be taking a challenging elective out of their wheelhouse.
Nope. I was specifically not talking about that. Spidercrab obviously got that. I guess he just reads better than you.
You missed an important shift in the conversation.
I started this with a complaint about my school’s policy of converting Ds to (non-GPA affecting) pass.
Melkerson didn’t understand my reluctance to do this, and was doing a “Let’s start with a simple world where the D ISN’T converted to a pass and see if we can agree about that world before we get to your more complicated world.”
This is really contrived, but I guess we do have a fundamental disagreement. I would likely do it, assuming that rich kid and poor kid are in consecutive spots and there is no third kid that is somehow affected by the flip (I’m having a hard time contriving that scenario, but if given enough time I probably could).
Each year around this time, tons of houses in my neighborhood put up yard signs congratulating their kids graduating from high school. Typically, the sign will point out where they’re going to college, like this example:
Prior to this year, the destination colleges would be a mix of schools mostly in the general region (I’m in central Ohio, outside of Columbus):
- Ohio State
- Miami of Ohio
- U of Kentucky
- Otterbein
- Ohio U
What’s interesting to me is that the distribution of this year’s signs has shifted enormously to Ohio State - I think it’s easily over 60% of the signs I see, while I’d guess it was closer to 20% in prior years. I’ve heard comments suggesting that it’s become much easier to get into OSU this year and, if so, I suspect that it has a lot to do with a lack of international applicants and/or less willingness for OSU to admit international applicants out of fear they won’t be able to enroll because of visa issues. (Consistent with this story.)
This has been kind of a long-standing issue/risk with higher education - that colleges and universities have seen huge demand from international students, which has been great for tuition revenue. But over-reliance on that international demand is risky, because myriad events (such as COVID, obviously) can cut that tuition source dramatically. I’ve seen at least one college’s credit rating explicitly mention this risk, although I can’t find that example right now.
I don’t know whether this is just a short-term blip or part of a longer-term trend, but I wonder if this is going to make it slightly easier for domestic students to be admitted to schools that were previously out of reach to them.