Today, after we got back our quizzes in my six-week long algebra class, one student raised her hand and asked if it were okay to not have used a graphing calculator on one of the questions that asked that one be used and then consulted to draw an estimate of what the graph of a particular function should look like since she did not have one yet because the instructor said on the first day of class that one would not be required until the second week of class. The instructor paused for a moment and said that it was indeed not acceptable and that she needed to have used one for full credit. The whole class seemed quite taken aback. Most instructors would have realized their mistake and awarded credit for requiring something she had previously stated was not required. I took a four-week class that ended just last week and the professor would go through the tests while the students were taking it and tell us the answers to the questions that were not addressed in lectures or our reading materials. Why, after all, should students suffer for the mistakes of their professors?

The rest of the class period was rather tense and uncomfortable. I could feel the loss of respect in the classroom. We all had this feeling like we weren’t being dealt with fairly. Each of us had become that poor girl in the front row. Now, as it turns out, that “poor girl” turned out to be rather bold and obnoxious, but none of us could really blame her. After all, we didn’t respect the teacher anymore. The wronged girl raised her hand a number of times questioning the teacher’s judgment and she did so with an indignant accusatory tone that made each of us in the class feel even more uncomfortable as the teacher then fought for her ideas openly. One such idea was that we should be using the calculator so much for what the girl thought were trivially easy tasks.

I propose the following as the first Article of Fairness in Academics:

Students will be marked down for their own mistakes and not for their teachers’ negligence.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Annoyances, Life, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.