FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for November 04, 2019

try studying much harder for a change, Peter

If that’s 79%, then this a good illustration of grade inflation.

I suppose honesty was not the best policy on that question.

That’s why my students only receive letter grades on assignments and tests. I’ve had far too many arguments over a single point, and oftentimes giving them that extra single point never got them out of the grade level anyway - they STILL had a C+ (or C, or D, or . . .).

Peter the future manager …

teachers should never use the word “gave” …assigned is better and doesn’t imply subjectivity. (one of my “337 things I learned while teaching”)

Doesn’t Peter usually go home with Ds? A C would be a step up.

Subtract 10 more points for talking.

For a college math class, I started a homework assignment where I was requested to prove something. But, I stopped part way through, confessing, like Peter, that I had failed.

Apparently, a lot of other students had trouble with that assignment. The professor wrote a proof on the board, which seemed much longer than other proofs we had been doing in the course. While the professor was writing, I gave the problem another thought. I realized there was an easy proof. But, I didn’t tell the professor until the final exam.

Grades must have changed their value drastically from when I was in school. 80-100% was an A, 70-79% was a B. 60-69% was a C, 50-59% was a D, and anything under 50% was an F and typically earned you a sound whipping when your parents saw your grade.

His interpersonal skills with negotiation are improving. Though not part of the class.

I did once get credit for an answer that began, “It’s a mystery to me…”

It was a standard threat in first-year biology that if you disputed the score on one question, you would get the whole test re-marked and would have to live with the result.