Saturday, February 07, 2009

article post: apparently universities care about grades.

admittedly, i once had this very same thought, except:

  1. i was going to give everyone B's instead of A's;
  2. i subsequently wondered how cool it would be if i had a magical mug which never ran out of fresh coffee.

as for which thought, i mean this one (as cut-and-pasted from the g1obe and mai1):

On the first day of his fourth-year physics class, Univer$ity of 0ttawa professor Denis Ran¢ourt announced to his students that he had already decided their marks: Everybody was getting an A+.

It was not his job, as he explained later, to rank their skills for future employers, or train them to be “information transfer machines,” regurgitating facts on demand. Released from the pressure to ace the test, they would become “scientists, not automatons,” he reasoned.

But by abandoning traditional marks, Prof. Ranc0urt apparently sealed his own failing grade: In December, the senior physicist was suspended from teaching, locked out of his laboratory and told that the university administration was recommending his dismissal and banning him from campus.


maybe writing and grading exams aren't that bad, after all.

i must say, the use of the word "automatons" was a nice touch.

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