Q&A: Student Solidarity
Student Solidarity
Question
With God's help,
Rabbi, I wanted to ask a somewhat puzzling question.
There is a senior student at our college who works grading homework, and he works in a "good" and overly serious way… and indirectly, because of strict grading (which he claims comes from higher up), he gives very low grades, with meticulous checking as if it were an exam, and he even started checking for copying and will probably begin reporting it.
For all the students, and for me too, this is pretty annoying, and the main reason it is so upsetting is that in the end he is a student who is supposed to be "one of us."
So I wanted to ask: is there really a moral flaw here? Because seemingly, after all, this is his job, and he claims he is following the procedures he was told to follow. And there is also no "written" contract among the students obligating them to help one another.
Also, it is fairly clear that if he did not do this job they would not find anyone else willing to do such meticulous work (I assume that if it were not a student, he would want more money, and if it were another student, he simply would not be willing to do such a good job, like all the beloved graders in previous years)…
I am asking because, on the one hand, we are all so angry at him, and on the other hand, in a dry, formal sense it is not clear that there is anything wrong or improper here. And yet it is still quite clear to me that if I did not need the money, there is no chance, God willing, that I would agree to do this.
Answer
Seemingly he is acting properly, since he is doing his work faithfully, as is the duty of an employee, and in an upright way. Still, even within the legitimate range there are different degrees of strictness, and one does not have to choose the strictest end.
Beyond that, there is plain common sense. In principle, it would be appropriate to bring about a situation in which all homework graders act this way, and then the competition would be fair. But assuming the general situation is not in my hands, my strictness creates unfair competition between my students and other students (since the former receive a lower grade for the same work). On the other hand, one should remember that strictness also benefits them, since they will have to be careful and study properly and know the material.
I do not have a textbook answer with general criteria. One has to use common sense. The best thing would be to speak with the fellow and tell him these things calmly (not with complaints and grumbling).
Discussion on Answer
That is not a plausible argument (and not just an unfair one). After all, every student has mistakes in both directions, so if overall points were deducted from him, he would indeed appeal. As for maintaining the average (normalization), there is much to discuss, but this is not the place.
The appeal is not submitted to some lofty fair-minded judge, but to the very same person who graded the question in the first place, and in general they do not like changing grades (not upward and not downward. It happens every day in many courses that someone appeals justifiably and they add 6 points, and then, miraculously, they find another question where they had given him exactly 6 extra points, and overall the equilibrium is preserved). In any case, that is how it happened (grades that looked almost like they were generated by a random-number generator, and the explanation mentioned was given), and I also planted some heavenly hints for the benefit of anyone who may stumble in here and was with me back then and remembers the story.
And as is well known, what the student and the Breslov Hasid have in common is this: both of their teachings are full of "exams," and both aspire to reach a "grade."
With the blessing, "Save, please, distinguished Zion," Ooni Bar Sitta
This reminded me of an episode that presents the opposite extreme.
There was a course that required extreme precision in tiny details (a lot of assembly and timing), and a friend of mine, who was a good friend of the "head teaching assistant," who among other things was in charge of grading the exams, heard from him when he was slightly tipsy, roughly as follows: the course staff consciously decided to grade sloppily in both directions. The grader would skim the answer; if it looked generally correct without going into the fine details, he gave a high score, and if something seemed off to him, he gave a low grade—through deliberate negligence. They just made sure to arrange their internal scale so that the course's usual average over the years would be preserved.
The explanation was this:
1. It is important to the faculty that the average remain similar (to preserve standing and fairness), and they take care of that.
2. In addition, they make things much easier for themselves in the grading, which is supposed to be pretty exhausting.
3. And most importantly—there are almost no appeals, because almost everyone who was mistaken against can see that they were also mistaken in his favor, so if he appeals they will check the whole exam, and then there is a serious risk that they will find and correct what was in his favor, and not accept what was against him, so he will come out empty-handed.
Rumors about the randomness of the exam grading spread through all the corridors, but no one imagined such a vile explanation.