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.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.
The minus is due to the fact that the paper was supposed to be about the Outkast song.
True. The star football players in high school got a free pass to do whatever they wanted during football season. When football season was over they got sent home.This is not just a college phenomenon. It is going on at the high school level as well.
I could have used a class like that back in the 90s when I was a student at UA!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 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.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.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.
Yet the ACC has admitted UL -- whose academic rank is somewhere around 200+!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.