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Comment by Sir_Substance | Hacker News Reader

The methodology is flawed. If a lecturer really is terrible, then more people will fail that course and not go on to do the advanced course, artificially raising the average for the advanced course because only the best students are able to pass the prerequisite DESPITE the terrible lecturer.

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I've had terrible professors who were ridiculously easy, though.

Like one guy I didn't learn a thing from, because he constantly mumbled and wrote in really tiny print on the whiteboard... yet the class before each test, he'd discuss every single test question in detail and tell us the answers.

A friend of mine had him for something else, and at one point after delivering a graded test, he said "if you didn't like your grade, give your test back to me and I'll give you more points". My friend, who got a 95, decided to give it back out of sheer curiosity and got back a 98.

Edit: Hey, I have another story about this dude: another friend of mine had him for a class. This friend is legally blind, so he once asked for more time to take the test since it takes him longer to read everything. A perfectly reasonable request: it's even listed on the form of accomodations offered by the university's Disability Services. Well, when the professor filled out the form, he granted my friend literally every single disability accomodation the university offered. He ended up with dozens of accomodations he didn't even ask for

This is called bribing the students. Many terrible professors do it and it works extremely well.

That's awful.

The right way to do it is "if you don't agree with your grade, give me your paper and I will look at it more carefully. Of course I'm not just going to look at the question you're contending, but all of them. Your grade may go up, but it also may go down. Do you wish to wager?"

A very good high school math teacher of mine did this.

I think he did not get very many takers; the students were never confident that they would not lose more undeserved marks in the other question to more than offset any gain.

What's so great about this strategy? When a teacher does this to me I assume he/she is more interested in doing his research instead of leading a class.

This was what we taught to say when I was a tutor for a university. The point was the student could not come and just point out that something was wrong with the marking and they deserve more points. If they thought the grade was not fair it could be remarked, but the whole thing would be remarked and a totally new grade assigned. You might come out better or worse for it.

I have actually mostly gotten this strategy from very dedicated teachers. It's meant to address a strategy clever and grade-seeking students work out very quickly: without something like this, constantly asking for regrades has zero cost, and occasionally benefit to you.

This moves regrade requests more toward "No, I checked over my exam again and I'm sure this is a mistake..." rather than "Maybe I'll pick up another point or two..."

> Do you wish to wager?

WTF does that even mean?

Look, I'm a student. I'm supposed to make mistakes. It's natural for me to be wrong. I should be wrong many times now so that I can learn and not make those mistakes in the future.

But you're a teacher. You are supposed to correct mistakes. You are supposed not to make mistakes, or at the very least to be honest about those mistakes. You're not supposed to try to intimidate me so that I stop questioning you; you're supposed to encourage critical thinking and healthy scepticism.

In short: if a teacher hears that he made a mistake when grading it's his duty to check it again, carefully; and if it happens to be true he should be honest about it and admit it instead of threatening that he'll lower the grade even further. What your teacher said could be read as: "Ok, so I may have fucked up, but that doesn't matter, because I'm so much smarter than you and I can fuck you up in any way I'd like; do you want me to show you?" Your teacher probably didn't mean it that way, but I met a fair share of teachers who did; it would be best to stay away from such ambiguous phrasings altogether.

The problem with being too open to regarded is that the teacher is inundated with frivolous requests. Grading is very time consuming, and regrading a test because a student simply isn't happy with the grade they earned is a horrible waste of time.

When I was teaching my policy was to reconsider anything a student felt was a mistake in grading, as long as it was accompanied by a written memo explaining precisely what the mistake was. I found this to be a good way to ensure I was getting legitimate regrade requests, since students would only put in the effort to write the memo if they really felt something was wrong.

+1 - I'd be very happy having a teacher like you, your approach I feel is a fair and honest one.

Basically, the idea is to discourage essentially spamming regrade requests as a zero cost effort on the part of the student that occasionally pays off.

That the teacher has made one mistake implies the teacher may have made more than one mistake, and there's some probability that those errors are in your favor. And if its really correctness you're worried about, rather than just going for a better grade, then you should be okay with a full on review. But you should be confident that there are errors, rather than just winging it for the occasional payoff.

There is a deeper lesson and that is that correctness is what you should be worried about. If you think that the paper was not graded correctly, then let it be graded again. You don't get to cherry pick instances of the truth that benefit you.

The vast majority of the worst teachers I've known--as a student, as a TA, and as an Assistant Professor--are also some of the easiest.

I had a terrible professor that was actually reasonably competent at teaching (the material wasn't hard in the first place, but still), but was terrible because of how she behaved in class. The best way to describe it is abusive.

As just one example: She'd do this thing after every exam where she would call off each name one at a time, have them walk to the front of the class to get back their graded test, where she would then berate them for anything they got wrong on the exam. It didn't matter if you got a A, if there was single thing wrong on the exam she would berate you over it. Really vicious personal attacks. It was so extreme that for a class of 20-30 students, it took the full hour to hand back tests. Averaging 2-3 minutes per student, yelling at them in front of the entire class.

Needless to say she always got awful reviews from her students, but if that effected her career, it was not apparent.

What’s his name, Dr. Umlaut? ☺

http://www.absurdnotions.org/page23.html

http://www.absurdnotions.org/page34.html

True in theory, but not true in practice. Terrible lecturers find ways to rationalize the poor grades of their students (i.e. externalize the blame) and curve grades to get kids to pass the class. Especially bad lecturers will give the bulk of students high grades to preclude complaints. For their part, poor students could care less about what they learn, instead focusing on passing or getting a good letter grade. In poor programs, subsequent more advanced courses in a sequence are subjected to downward pressure when it comes to teaching more rigorous or advanced topics because the students suck so badly (because of the lack of rigor in early courses). A cluster of poor students can be surprisingly good at stymieing course progress. Many professors have to perform research and would rather placate the students with good grades instead of wasting their research time, which is vital to maintaining their careers (Teaching is secondary at research universities no matter what administration tells you) . The can gets kicked down the road, and mediocrity matriculates.

Couldn't care less*

I believe the term 'could care less' is largely facetious- "I could care less... but it would be extremely difficult," tends to be the implication; don't understand why you found it necessary to correct him.

edit: Added clarification.

Eh, I think it's just a common mistake, and I corrected them because it's a pet peeve of mine, not because I think it is a big deal. Your line of thinking is not new to me though, and if "could care less" is sarcastic then I would argue it is particularly ineffective sarcasm (see: http://incompetech.com/gallimaufry/care_less.html).

It's no longer a common mistake, it's now become an idiom in some dialectic variations. As such it cannot be broken down into its constituent parts and analyzed for meaning, it has to be understood as an atomic utterance. It's a little like "The proof is in the pudding." The original was "The proof (test) of the pudding is in the eating," but it got shortened, possibly by mistake, possibly by laziness. And so it is with "I could(n't) care less."

It's like sandpaper on my brain, but that's how linguistics works. The more you study language, the more you realize it can't possibly work.

The more you study language, the more you realize that none of it makes sense. It's a wonder how any of us English speakers understand what each other are talking about. I think the trick is to only look deep enough to gauge the sentiment of the presenter and no further. If you look too deeply, the whole thing falls to pieces.

Generally I agree with this approach, but this case seems similar (though obviously not in the safety aspects) to "flammable" versus "inflammable". Obviously you can't really stop actual usage, but I know this used to always confuse me when I was younger, so I'm disinclined to criticize people who yell "Stop!".

The other thing that people often overlook, is that "could care less" and "couldn't care less" mean exactly the same thing IF the person saying "could care less" was intending to be sarcastic.

As in:

"I couldn't care less about this test." (literal)

"I could care less about this test." (sarcastic)

Yes, the actual expression is "couldn't care less" but I can easily see how people think it is "could care less" (in a sarcastic tone).

Same as "by the waist side" instead of "by the wayside." The term "wayside" is so rarely used now that people mishear it and rationalise the alternative definition that does make sense.

There are other examples too (correct on the right):

- Nip it in the butt vs. Nip it in the bud

- One in the same vs. One and the same

- You’ve got another thing coming vs. You’ve got another think coming

- Each one worse than the next vs. Each one worse than the last

- On accident vs. By accident

- For all intensive purposes vs. For all intents and purposes

- Extract revenge vs. Exact revenge

- etc

> As such it cannot be broken down into its constituent parts and analyzed for meaning, it has to be understood as an atomic utterance.

I understand the implicit preface that is something like "If you want to communicate frictionlessly …", but I think that one actually doesn't have to do this. The arguments for accepting variants of spelling do not, I think, automatically apply to accepting (illogical) variants of phrases; while there is no intrinsically 'right' spelling of a word, there is a sense (given what the constituent words mean) in which "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" are objectively different, and the latter captures what is probably meant.

I mean to say that it is perfectly possible to insist on, and to try to enforce, a logical approach to the use of language. (Without this impulse, for example, we wouldn't have Lojban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban)—which, OK, may not be a very practical loss, but I think we can agree would be an intellectual loss.) Granted this will not optimise for communication, or pleasant social interaction, but we all have the right to choose the fitness metric that we want to use!

I'd like to start a new saying "I quantum state care".

If the lecturer is solely responsible for the final grade then there isn't necessarily any correlation between how bad the lecturer is and if you pass or fail.

One of the worst lecturers I had at university (thought the course he was teaching was way beneath him and basically didn't give a fuck) also gave such extremely easy tests that basically everybody passed almost despite themselves.

Yeah, or even... good students are better at identifying bad professors. Some of my professors were leaders in their field but couldn't teach a class worth anything. I can see why the smart students would get good grades in those classes. Why wouldn't the rest of us be able to tell that they were a bad professor??

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