What's fair? A letter to a student

by Leigh Pomeroy

I happen to teach a large film class. This semester I ended up with over 240 students and received help from a graduate student only during the test sessions.

One of the greatest challenges of being a college teacher today is dealing with plagiarism and cheating. The dishonest students make up maybe 10% of the class — Oh? You're surprised at this number? — but all too often they take up 50% of the time. Being a college professor today means being one-half cop.

Academic dishonesty aside, the end of the semester also brings challenges from students who are unhappy with their grades. Here is a letter I received from one:

So I will be recieving [sic] a B for my grade? I am willing to do anything and I think that is completely unfair. One of my friends made it to a total of probably 3 of your classes and he will be getting a low B. I will have missed it by half of a point and I have made it to every class, did every assignment, did the extra credit, and retook the final. Every test I made notecards and studied before every test unlike a lot of people that are really good at tests. I am not the best at tests but I did everthing [sic] I could as far as the homework. So there is no way I can get .5 percent to get an A?

Because she was insistent and did do all the written assignments particularly well, I relented, rescored one of her assignments, and gave her an "A". But her comment about "fairness" struck me about how so many of today's college students feel entitled. So I typed out the response below and sent it to her by email:

OK. I raised your grade [by one point on the first assignment], basically taking away the penalty for being late. (It was, in fact, very well done.) That gives you a 90 for the course.

As for fairness...

1. It is probably unfair that the +/- system of grading is currently optional. If students want the +/- system they should forcefully advocate for it. As I have mentioned in class and in the study session, students should challenge faculty and administration to do a better job.

2. It is definitely unfair if you are a child born in Haiti as opposed to being a child born in the U.S. Midwest, especially when you have to deal with a horrendous earthquake.

3. It is definitely unfair if you are a child born in Africa to a mother with HIV/AIDS and on top of that have to live on less than $1 a day and trek five miles for water.

4. It is definitely unfair to be a child born into the Harijan caste in India and be termed an untouchable all your life.

5. It is definitely unfair to be born a female in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or any number of other countries in the world where women are 2nd class citizens.

6. It is definitely unfair to be a college student today knowing that by the time you are 60 years old there will be 9.2 billion people on the planet, 74% more than the 5.3 billion living in the world the year you were born.

7. It is definitely unfair to be a college student today knowing that your parents' and grandparents' generations have lived high on the hog wasting resources, running up debt (putting your retirement at risk), despoiling the environment, and pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere that by the time you are 60 Minnesota may have the weather of Kansas and Kansas the weather of Mexico.

Need I go on?

Prof P

Hopefully, the fact that she got an A instead of a B in a survey film class will become less important than developing an idea about what really counts in the world.

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