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Comment by Vaslo | Hacker News Reader

Random other point of brilliance I've seen: Our Organic Chem teacher (who was loved universally in the Program) had a rule about test corrections. If you wanted a correction to something you believed you should get credit on, he would only offer to regrade your WHOLE test, which meant you could actually get less points on the regrade because it was he and not a TA regrading (could have worked both ways). It really scared off all those one-off "Can I get an extra point here" requests in a 300 person class.

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When I was a professor this is the way I would regrade too. I would regrade blind to the first mark so I didn’t bias myself. I don’t think I ever had a regrade that changed more than 5% and most were identical.

I would also grade all exams the first time blind to who the student was and then regrade a half dozen again to make sure that I hadn’t drifted out of grade over the marking process.

I used to play an game with myself (marking is very boring) as to who would get what mark based on my in class knowledge of the student (when you run labs you do get to know the individual students). It was a rare student that got a exam mark more than 10% outside my estimate.

This was the policy for any final exam at my alma mater.

You had to be rather certain that you were sufficiently wronged overall, otherwise a few points more on one question could be offset by a large number of negated points from other questions where the professor thought that the TA might have been too generous.

I think that was the way it worked at my university too, at least officially. Unofficially, very few teachers actually graded that way, and when I saw it happen, people complained about it a lot.

Then again, the teachers that did it seemed like they were doing it punitively (e.g. subtracting the exact amount of points they were forced to add.)

I’ve never understood why that’s a good policy. You’re (vindictively) punishing the student for pointing out — albeit selectively — where the teacher, supposedly a bedrock of truth on the course material, has falsely labeled your “training data”.

I think you're running under the assumption that all students making the request are doing it for the right reasons.

I could be wrong, but my intuition goes the other way and I'm assuming most students do it to get a better grade, not learn more.

Yeah no, you don't get to say students should care more about learning than grades when jobs, opportunities, and scholarships given by the very university that claims learning is more important are riding on grades.

It is the professor's responsibility to grade accurately, and honestly if there is so much inconsistency in grading that there's a significant probability that the student will lose marks despite having pointed out a reason they should gain marks, the professor is screwing up very badly[1]. Don't pin that on the student not having noble intentions or whatever.

[1]:Or at least that's the case in STEM. My humanities friends tell me that grading is much more subjective there which is a bit disturbing but I'm hardly qualified to make such judgments.

As long as we're getting all realpolitik about it, the reason is that lots of students are assholes who will run roughshod over any professor who shows weakness. Source: was a student, watched it happen routinely.

Meanwhile, in a less politically charged situation, it's pretty normal, or at least smart, to go back over any area where you messed up with a fine-toothed comb.

If, and this is a rather pessimistic assumption, if the student is likely to lower their grade on a re-test, in my experience it's more likely to be because the original grader was being generous in the face of ambiguity, rather than systemic random errors. That's because the graders are mostly nice people. If that's not good enough for someone, they damn well better have a good reason for it. I have no problem with policy that enforces this. The politics are a distraction from the ethical question.

That policy would make sense, but that involves major caveats that aren't clear from the original description. That works because it's specifically written with "generosity buffer" that (by design) only benefits your grade, and thus doesn't indicate the teacher was falsely labeling the answers as correct when they weren't.

That's not the same thing as the original, which implied "my grading is so random, hope you're lucky on the rescore".

Edit: I had a high school teacher with a policy where she’d add X points to every score from the get go, and you’dlose those if you objected to grading, so you’d only object for misgrades by more than X. But that’s not the same as the original “okay, let’s roll my truth-recognizer dice again!”

Exactly. It's ridiculous that teachers are fine with such inconsistent grading on something they (and their graders) are supposed to be experts at -- let alone that they take such joy in leveraging such unhelpful inconsistency against students who objected to them propagating falsehoods!

It reminds me of those "drunk driving costs you $15k" ads, where most of that comes from the expense of navigating the court system (bail, attorney's fees), and the state is somehow proud of this fact.

>I think you're running under the assumption that all students making the request are doing it for the right reasons.

No, that's what the "albeit selectively" clause was referring to.

>I could be wrong, but my intuition goes the other way and I'm assuming most students do it to get a better grade, not learn more.

As in my comment, it doesn't matter. Their job is to be an expert on this material. Failing to correctly label an answer is failing at their job. Punishing someone for pointing out a failure at your job is unprofessional.

This was a common approach at my Uni. I only once challenged it, but the issue was an entire question wasn't marked at all, so the lecturer didn't remark the rest.

One other time, I asked the lecturer (different paper) where I went wrong on a question, and turn's out I was right all along, got that question regraded without the potential downside to a full remark.

I agree. I've seen this done and it was effective. Combined with requiring the request to be made in person, during office hours, it also got struggling students to actually attend the office hours (which often was otherwise empty, and another waste of the grader's time).

The students I knew who tried to complain their way into a better grade would have been better off if they'd tried to study.

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