Deadspin Article on UNC Athlete's Final Paper

mikes12

All-American
Nov 10, 2005
3,548
0
0
49
Chattanooga, TN
If put what I'd like to put, it would be deleted or moved to non-sports, so I'll try to keep it relevant.

Essentially, if you like college sports, particularly football and basketball, this will happen. It goes on everywhere at some level. It's about eligibility, getting the blue chip functioning moron studs, and alumni donations.

Any more would get political so I'll stop there.
 

FlumDog

New Member
Nov 20, 2013
14
0
0
Tallahassee, FL
I've never really had much respect for the grading of 'papers' at any level in any class because it is so subjective. Of course this is an extreme example of a deserved 'F' instead of a given 'A-' but it's still subjective.

I always enjoyed the classes where your grade on tests were the result of black and white rules...like Math and Science. Answers to questions in those subjects were either right or wrong with no gray area for interpretation or favoritism by a teacher.

In my freshman year of college I had a Literature class where a buddy of mine swore he was getting bad grades(C-to C+) just because the teacher disliked him. I usually at least received an A for my papers and to be honest I thought my friend's papers should have at least been B's at the worst.

So we did a little experiment where one week we both wrote our papers but swapped the names just to test the teacher. I received a B+(which was really my friends paper) with the note 'not up to your usual standards' and he received a C+(which was my paper) with no note at all.

I was shocked that he was pretty much right. He had been writing papers in the 'B' range and getting C's for them and for my paper (which should have been anywhere from a B+ to A) she gave him a 'C+' anyway JUST because his name was on it.

Any respect I had left for teachers was gone at that point. They really do have free reign to just give grades out good or bad with no real rhyme or reason.

So my point is that teachers shoulder a LOT of the blame for instances like this UNC situation.
First, I admit that *some* teachers are bad teachers. But like others have pointed out, you cannot infer from this fact to the claim that *all* teachers are bad teachers who can just get away with anything. I know that teachers do not have free reign to just give out grades willy nilly from first hand experience. First, in most schools, teacher's promotions are partly dependent upon student evaluations. So if a teacher gets lots of bad evals for whatever reason, then they won't get promoted. Second, I teach philosophy regularly at a local community college and sometimes at FSU. These classes require lots of writing. While I admit that *part* of the grade for these papers is subjective, not all of it is. My goal in grading papers is to be as objective as possible. In theory, if I graded the same paper over and over again I would give it the same grade plus or minus 2 or 3 points.

If a student wishes to challenge his grade (like your friend should have), then, in most cases, the teacher is required to meet with the student and go over the paper justifying why the student received the grade he did. I've had to do this many times. I sit down and go over the paper line by line and explain what they did wrong and how to get it better. In some cases, I've been made aware of mistakes that I made and I corrected the grade accordingly.

So my point is that you should be careful about which inferences you make from your limited evidence.
 

Catfish

Hall of Fame
Oct 11, 2005
6,566
2
45
60
Birmingham
When I was an undergrad (not at Bama), I took a trig class during the first Summer seesion. When I went in the first day, there was a guy I had met a few times through my then girlfriend who was a back-up QB. We weren't friends or anything, but we knew each other, so we sat together talking and waiting for the class to begin. About 5 minutes into the introduction, he fell asleep and slept through the rest of the class. I never saw him again for the rest of the session until the final. He wasn't there for any of the quizzes or tests, but did show up for the final exam. I ran into him again shortly after the beginning of the Fall semester and asked him how he did in the class. He said he got an A.
 

lowend

All-SEC
Feb 20, 2005
1,252
975
132
As a fifth year senior, I had to double back and take English 101 at UA. It was packed with softball and volleyball players. Honestly, it was the easiest class I had at UA. Every school has "those" sections of classes and "those" majors. It's the price of big-time college athletics. You can't expect to take a kid out of the ghetto who has never had any home support and expect them to perform academically the same way as a kid from a wealthy suburban area. Yes, there are always exceptions, but this is more true than not.
 

Vinny

Hall of Fame
Sep 27, 2001
8,243
213
187
55
Rockaway, NJ
I remember having a web design class at Alabama where each week you had to turn in your project for the week and it counted for 25% of your grade. After the second week, the teacher said that he doesn't even check them so as long as you turned in a disk (people still used 3.5" floppies back then) you got full credit for the assignment.
I could have used a class like that back in the 90s when I was a student at UA!
 

davefrat

Hall of Fame
Jun 4, 2002
5,172
3,885
282
Hopewell, VA
As a fifth year senior, I had to double back and take English 101 at UA. It was packed with softball and volleyball players. Honestly, it was the easiest class I had at UA. Every school has "those" sections of classes and "those" majors. It's the price of big-time college athletics. You can't expect to take a kid out of the ghetto who has never had any home support and expect them to perform academically the same way as a kid from a wealthy suburban area. Yes, there are always exceptions, but this is more true than not.
I had one athlete in my class when I was a teaching assistant in grad school who misspelled his own last name on his papers and could barely read.
 

4Q Basket Case

FB|BB Moderator
Staff member
Nov 8, 2004
9,569
12,865
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Tuscaloosa
I agree with the general tenor of most posts on this thread. Essentially that, while the UNC paper might be a bit extreme, all colleges that sponsor major sports have short-cuts for athletes.

What makes this so sweet is the academic superiority complex of most schools in the ACC, and especially UNC, UVa, and Duke. Those guys really do look down their over-bred noses at all but a select few public universities, especially any in the SEC.

The delicious end is that UNC has been exposed as prissy hypocrites who now have neither their erstwhile sacrosanct academic integrity, nor huge athletic success.

I do think that if this had happened to Alabama, it would be the lead story in a 60 Minutes expose, and pasted on the front page of every paper in the country. But if it weren't for Tidefans, I wouldn't have known about it. Can't hear a dang thing over all the crickets chirping.
 

tide96

All-SEC
Oct 4, 2005
1,616
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As a fifth year senior, I had to double back and take English 101 at UA. It was packed with softball and volleyball players. Honestly, it was the easiest class I had at UA. Every school has "those" sections of classes and "those" majors. It's the price of big-time college athletics. You can't expect to take a kid out of the ghetto who has never had any home support and expect them to perform academically the same way as a kid from a wealthy suburban area. Yes, there are always exceptions, but this is more true than not.
Stats 110 was the easiest class I ever had, but it is different for everyone.
 

Padreruf

Hall of Fame
Feb 12, 2001
8,687
12,227
287
73
Charleston, South Carolina
I agree with the general tenor of most posts on this thread. Essentially that, while the UNC paper might be a bit extreme, all colleges that sponsor major sports have short-cuts for athletes.

What makes this so sweet is the academic superiority complex of most schools in the ACC, and especially UNC, UVa, and Duke. Those guys really do look down their over-bred noses at all but a select few public universities, especially any in the SEC.

The delicious end is that UNC has been exposed as prissy hypocrites who now have neither their erstwhile sacrosanct academic integrity, nor huge athletic success.

I do think that if this had happened to Alabama, it would be the lead story in a 60 Minutes expose, and pasted on the front page of every paper in the country. But if it weren't for Tidefans, I wouldn't have known about it. Can't hear a dang thing over all the crickets chirping.
Yet the ACC has admitted UL -- whose academic rank is somewhere around 200+!
 

mdb-tpet

All-SEC
Sep 2, 2004
1,478
1,191
182
I'll offer up the counter example, just to show not all athletes are only interested in sports. I had a class with Kris Mangum at UA, who was a pretty good student and received no favoritism that I was aware of, and he attended all of his classes in person before he transferred to Ole Miss.
 

rolltideallday

1st Team
Dec 18, 2011
514
0
0
Tuscaloosa, AL
I guess I was in one of these easy classes that athletes take a couple years ago. I had a couple football players, a gymnast, some swimmers, and someone on the row team. The class was Health 101 that I took for an easy 3 credits during a very difficult semester. It was the easiest class I've had in 5 years but that might have be the case for any Health 101 class.
 

rolltideallday

1st Team
Dec 18, 2011
514
0
0
Tuscaloosa, AL
S
The fact that it's an awful paper for a college kid to turn in isn't even the worst part about the scandal. The fact that it's plagiarized from a 3rd grade story entitled "Rosa Parks: My Story" is the true kicker.

_______

I don't know how to post comments from that article correctly, but please tell me this is true
 

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