If I've gone to all the trouble to study for an exam anyway, just in case, then I'd much rather actually take the exam to check my knowledge. The article tries to paint this result as a case of solidarity and coordination, rather than slacking and intimidation. "on the day of the exam, all the students arrived half an hour early and stood outside the doors to make sure no one went into the exam room"; what is this, a picket line?
I had a few classes that had three exams and a final, and the grading policy dropped the lowest exam score. Even when I got 100% or more on the first two exams, and got explicitly told by the professor that the exam was optional and I didn't need to show up, I still took the last one, because why not check the knowledge I studied?
Given the intimidation factor, I'd probably end up asking the professor if I could take the exam outside of the normal class time anonymously, and leave people to guess based on who isn't in the same class the next term.
I find your approach distasteful. And that's putting it charitably, to be honest.
The idea that you would feign solidarity in a social experiment with real consequences so you could screw fellow students surreptitiously is just as bad (I would argue worse) than the intimidation you are presuming existed. In fact, even under the presumption that intimidation occurs, you are admitting to happily screwing over other students who would have been happy to take the test, but for the intimidation. So the fellow victims of the "crime" get punished once by them, and then again, by you.
If you actually want to take a principled stand, you'd have to do something shocking like.. be honest with everyone with what you intend on doing, and why.
As someone who has been bullied in school for actually, you know, trying to learn and take the tests I find his approach perfectly ok. You don't know what intimidation is like until you've been on the receiving end of it and a whole class of people your own age telling you you can't do what you came to school for can be pretty intimidating.
Ya! Its way too easy to get caught up in a crowd/mob even if its not something you really believe in. There is just pressure to follow. The really brave people is the one who boycotts the exam on his own without any expectation that others will follow them, and with the expectation that nothing will really happen and they'll just get a zero. You know, real consequences with little upside. Then you are being principled!
> As someone who has been bullied in school for actually, you know, trying to learn and take the tests I find his approach perfectly ok. You don't know what intimidation is like until you've been on the receiving end of it and a whole class of people your own age telling you you can't do what you came to school for can be pretty intimidating.
"Wanting to learn and take the test" (let's call it the education principle) is every bit a principle worth standing for. But so is honesty. There is far more education going on here than what is on that test. I'd argue if you are actually willing to surreptitiously screw your fellow classmates, bullies and bullied alike, for the sake of both "taking the test" and avoiding intimidation, I'd hope you are self-reflective enough to realize what this teaches you about yourself.
The way I see it: "the education principle", honesty, and easy. You get to pick two. And I'm going to criticize any (ostensible -- in the case of the students themselves) adult who advocates picking the dishonest path. At some point we put away our childish things and we solve our problems like adults.
People who cheerfully exploit mob dynamics to intimidate others don't have a claim on the honesty of those they attempt to intimidate. That argument reminds me of bullies who complain when they meet an unexpected defeat that their intended victim was not 'fighting fair'. The willingness to initiate force, whether individually or in a group, does not confer any sort of moral authority whatsoever. Indeed, the physical authority garnered from the exercise of force is often sought as a substitute for the lack of moral authority.
I wouldn't feign solidarity; if coordination occurred ahead of time, I'd indicate that I didn't plan to skip the exam. I just said that I'd rather not try to push past the picket line at exam time.
Logically speaking, you are correct, but human beings are rarely logical; even less so when there's a group of them.
Taking the test may provide self-validation, but it will do so at the expense of all of your classmates failing the course. In the end all you'll prove is that you were so inept (socially) that you were willing to sacrifice all of your peers for nothing more than pride.
Pride? No, partially a desire to actually get all of the education you are digging yourself into debt for, partially out of annoyance of a childish prank, and even more partially out of annoyance at a childish prank that assumes your cooperation.
If they want to be a bunch of clowns, that isn't my business. If they choose to make their clowning my business, then I am not responsible for the fallout when I don't fall into step with them.
And make no mistake about it, there was without a doubt social pressure and coercion in this situation. Your response to me demonstrates that quite clearly. If a cornerstone of your prank is your peers not being "squares", then your prank is coercive.
Agreed. If this is really about checking your knowledge, it would probably not be hard to convince the prof or TA to let you get feedback on a practice final, for no grade, without screwing over the rest of the class. Or you could just use what you learned to code a project and put it online for real peer review.
If you just want to check your knowledge why not ask the professor if you can come by his office sometime during the vast amount of time he'll save from not having to grade a bunch of exams (presuming he wasn't going to have his TAs grade the finals -- I remember my professors grading finals themselves since TAs had their own finals to take, and because it was the final, after all), and go over stuff with him then? I'd much rather have a direct discussion with my professor than a paper exam.
And considering the fittingness of exploiting this loophole for a CS course -- what a great illustration of an unanticipated consequence of a system's rules being followed exactly! -- you'd have to be a huge jerk to want to screw over everyone else in the class just to check your knowledge.
Edit: I don't think it would work like you envision it anyway. The professor would have to in on it, and good luck getting him to help screw over everyone else. I can't see a professor who was a good enough sport to honor this policy despite the unexpected way it was used letting you take it in a way that left everyone else with 0s, and only you with a 100. For instance, if he shows up the day of the exam and says "unfortunately, someone already took it anonymously" then everyone else just gets to play a game of spot-the-missing-student while taking the exam. (I suppose you could show up and pretend to take it a second time...)
>>>> you'd have to be a huge jerk to want to screw over everyone else in the class just to check your knowledge.
No you don't. You don't owe anybody to behave according to their expectations, even if your behaving so would be wonderful for them. It's not your duty and you're not a jerk if you don't comply with their wishes. You are free to do either, and they are free to convince you, but saying "oh, we expected you to do this and you don't and this sucks for us so you're a jerk" is bullshit. Nobody has obligation to help his fellow student to cheat.
Just like how you don't have to clean up your garbage in public, and like how when you have a heard of cows, you don't have to listen to the other farmers in coordinating the use of the fields.
I think sacrificing a test (which the professor himself said was nitpicky) to teach students about public coordination and working together to avoid a tragedy of the commons is not bullshit, nor will it ever be bullshit.
If your cheat involves executing something far more difficult then actually studying and acing the test, cheat away.
If having to take a test is a tragedy for you, maybe you shouln't have enrolled in the class for starters. For me it is a normal outcome and presenting it as if it is a huge disaster everybody has moral obligation to help avoiding is nonsense.
And how does not having to take the final hurt his education?
He can still study just as much as he would've before.
He still has access to resources to check the results of that studying.
I'm extremely skeptical of concerns that it would have a significant negative impact on future classes that this exam could've potentially weeded people out before. It could happen, though when I was TA'ing most weeding-out usually happened before the final...
I guess the anonymously-screw-everyone-else solution would also give him the opportunity to have a spectacularly sociopathic answer to that YC application "hacked a non-software system" question...
Frankly, if you're going to screw things up for everyone else like this, given that it doesn't actually let you learn anything more than you could've anyway, the least you can do is to do it face to face. Heck, I'd be secretly hoping that one of the "guards" did try to start something physical. Then he'd both bomb the final and be in trouble for assault or whatever.
Forget educational merit, he paid for the damn test. Is it so unreasonable for him to want to take it?
If his peers want to make it a matter of "do something you don't want to do, or else you are a 'square'", then they can kindly fuck off.
The only proper way to organize a prank of this sort is with an anonymous vote. If there was not an anonymous vote, I would anonymously choose to not participate.
What I'm trying to get at is that I see no moral "they were mean bullies!" high ground here, since a final is not required for one to be educated by a class. Anyone wanting the screw the rest of the class over was "mean" first. Anyone who intimidated anyone else into going along looks bad; so does anyone who didn't want to go along so that their fellow students would do worse. It's absurd to look at is as "I paid for that test." Education as paying for tests is a bug, not a feature.
Elsewhere in the thread you call it "clowning." I call it "hacking." The educational value of learning that sometimes you can get things done in non-traditional ways, and everyone ends up well off as a result, is far higher than the educational value of taking yet another exam.
"Moral high-ground" has nothing to do with it. As stated in the article, there is absolutely no ethical obligation to play along. The expectation that everyone should follow along is absurd for the reasons that I laid out, but those points are not about morality or ethics.
I have laid out how to perform this "hack" ethically however: If, and only if, an anonymous unanimous vote performed would there be any ethical obligation to go along with it. Without that it is not a "hack" ...unless your definition of "hack" permits coercion. If coercion is considered unnecessary, then there is no reason to not hold an anonymous unanimous vote.
Each participant must be given the opportunity to opt-in, without any coercion whatsoever. Is that really an unreasonable ask?
If I were handed a ballot for this prank, I would vote No. (Why do I want to take the test? Many reasons, some I have already covered, some I have not. Frankly it is no ones business but my own and has no bearing on the ethics of the situation) If they then proceeded to attempt it anyway, their failing grades would not be my problem. If they neglected to hold the vote and assumed my participation, their failing grades would similarly not be my problem. If they held a vote, and I voted Yes, but then took the test anyway, then I would be the jackass.
You can "hack" as much as you want, but others do not have obligation to follow your wishes. The fact that so many people think others are obliged to do what they want and if they don't they are "jerks" who "screw them over" is a sad symptom of current entitlement culture, where everybody considers himself king of the world for no reason at all but for being there.
You are free to hold yourself to any standard you like. It still does not create any obligations on others. If you give to charity, that doesn't mean your neighbor is obliged to match your donation. If you think he has - this is a clear sign of entitlement, you feel entitled to control his actions and have hin behave the way you like.
What is the practical difference between "person A being obliged to do something for B", and "B being entitled to something from A"?
If you universalize your moral obligation, then we end up with a system that is in practice no different than everyone feeling entitled to things from others. That you choose to handle yourself in that manner is great, but you cannot universalize it without creating a society of entitlement.
You are completely and totally ignoring the point.
Wanting to take the test is not problematic. Opting out of the boycott and taking the test is not problematic. Allowing everyone to believe he is joining the boycott, and secretly taking the test anyway is dishonest douchebaggery of the highest order.
There are alternate solutions to this problem that do not involve both skipping out on the educational value you perceive to result from taking this take while simultaneously fucking over every one of your classmates, including "innocent victims" who felt pressured into joining the boycot.
I, or any other hypothetical student, am under absolutely no obligation to explain myself or report my actions to some frat kids who want to skip out on studying.
If I indicated, through an anonymous vote, that I would participate in their boycott but did not, then I would be a jackass. In absence of such an indication, what I choose to do or not do, say or not say, is my business alone.
"Punish them"?!? Give me a fucking break. How entitled can you be?
I'm not being colourful when I say "frat kids". They literally had frat kids "guarding" the exam to ensure that nobody entered. I reject your implication that I have any obligation to engage in honest non-anonymous discourse with groups like that.
Again, there are two general avenues here that you can take assuming you want to receive the "benefit" of having taken the test.
You can do it in a way that benefits you but completely fucks over a bunch of other students, including others who may have been "bullied" against their will. Or you can find a way to do it in a way that benefits you and has zero impact on others.
Knowingly and stubbornly committing to doing the former is a dick thing to do, and kind of makes you an asshole. Not the type of "asshole" that acts to further their own self-interest. But the type of asshole who actively acts to subvert the interests of others.
How about I do nothing except take my exam as normal?
Oh no, that would be a dick thing to do. Actively subverting them... by taking an exam in a class they also happen to be enrolled in... Pure entitlement culture.
If they ask, they won't fuck themselves over. If they don't ask, they will fuck themselves over. They are responsible for what happens to them. As long as they do not ask me for my input, I have no responsibility for their actions.
For the record: for a computer systems course I TAed, the two professors, myself and the other TA spent 6 hours total in a room grading, for midterms and finals. For two different semesters. So, it varies.
Intimidation probably played a role in people not taking the exam, but they weren't there soley for intimidation. If someone did walk in to take the exam, they all would have done the same - they were there in case someone did, they would avoid the 0.
"A couple of Pi Kappa Alpha (Pike) brothers guarded the doors."
What would have happened if you had tried to go past these guards? Would they have said, "Oh damn, well, he really wanted to go in, guess we'll all have to take the test"? Or would they have restrained you? (which may be considered battery or possibly false imprisonment)
This could have very easily turned into a lawsuit or a criminal case if any student had decided to take the test.
Correct, which is why I said "intimidation probably played a role." I don't know how much, but I find it likely it was there. But my point was that even if they applied no intimidation, they would have still shown up to avoid getting that 0.
Collective-action Prisoner's Dilemma. And everyone cooperated! You might have acted rationally had you decided to take the exam, but you'll find that social pressure will occasionally make everyone (a) much nicer than you, and (b) in blatant disregard of game-theoretic rationality.
Actually, to make it a real case of Prisoner's Dilemma, he could have given the students who took the test a 100 and everyone else a 0, but given everyone an 80 if no one took the test. Which I would have found much more interesting.
> You might have acted rationally had you decided to take the exam, but you'll find that social pressure will occasionally make everyone (a) much nicer than you, and (b) in blatant disregard of game-theoretic rationality.
I definitely would have acted rationally, because I place very little value on getting to skip an exam or on proving a point about the grading system, and much more value on actually getting the education I paid for.
> Actually, to make it a real case of Prisoner's Dilemma, he could have given the students who took the test a 100 and everyone else a 0, but given everyone an 80 if no one took the test. Which I would have found much more interesting.
It's already a real case of the prisoner's dilemma, but with different rewards for different people depending on what they value. Most of the students in the article placed a higher value on not having to take the exam. I would place a higher value on taking the exam.
> I definitely would have acted rationally, because I place very little value on getting to skip an exam or on proving a point about the grading system, and much more value on actually getting the education I paid for.
Do you mind explaining the thought process behind this? I find it to be quite a stretch to suggest that a 50 minute evaluation at the end of the semester would be such an integral component of the learning that occurs during a semester that foregoing it would jeopardize "getting the education I paid for."
One exam might not be a make-or-break event, but why miss an opportunity? Besides, I usually find tests (particularly challenging ones) fun, contrary to the prevailing sentiment of dread or resentment.
It seems unlikely you would've been been able to check your knowledge due to the nature of the grading system being employed.
In my experience, getting a final exam back complete with annotations and corrections is generally not done: you simply get a grade reported. In the case of you being the only one taking the exam (e.g., the professor let you take it after everyone decided not to show up), you would've gotten an automatic 100.
That is to say, you could very well not know anything correctly, not realize it, and be none the wiser when you get your grade back.
I wonder what they would do if somebody said "screw you guys, I've studied for the exam and I want to take it". Would they resort to violence? Would campus security have to be involved?
"In a programming course, it’s exceedingly difficult to judge one’s knowledge of a subject by a written 50 minute exam. It ends up being a test on nit-picky details and doesn’t accurately determine the good programmers from the great, or the not so great." -- Student
Whereas of course boycotting an exam reveals so much more about one's programming knowledge!
[Edit: my comment was in reply to a sentence in the parent comment which has since been removed.]
There's nothing they "got away with".
“In my courses, all grades are relative to the highest actually
achieved score. Thus, if no one showed up and everyone got 0
percent, everyone would be marked as 100 percent,” Froehlich
wrote.
The students took advantage of a stated policy and received the promised result of that policy. It's game theory, and they played by the game's rules fair and square.
Yes, but it does seem like the students were cheeky and got away with it. They played the game according to the rules, but there is the issue of gentlemanly conduct.
I think the question hinges on whether or not it was an intended consequence. The professor said:
“I had decided that I am sticking to my policy, they had
decided to boycott the exam, and that was pretty much it,”
Froelich wrote. “The students learned that by coming
together, they can achieve something that individually they
could never have done.”
This seems to indicate he approves. Though now that the previously theoretical concept has been proven, he has changed the rules so that if everyone gets 0 points, then everyone ends up with 0 percent too.
I got the impression that the professor had anticipated this as a possible outcome, and was intentionally challenging the students to overcome the coordination problem, as he didn't think they'd be able.
There is something more important that the students learned by organizing themselves this way: that they are not each other's enemies. I am sure a few students received high marks that they did not deserve as a result, but I suspect that would have been the case even had the students taken the exam (judging by what I saw as a TA in my first year of grad school).
The professor now offers students a choice between an exam and a project, and the students voted for a project. The project is a better way to measure their aptitude. On the whole, I think this was positive for all involved.
If only. Highschool was - to put it mildly - a sequence of bullies trying to get away with the absolute minimum and being enemy to quite a few of the other students. Never quite enough that they could muster a response. I've never seen such enmity in adults in any workplace as I've seen in schools.
The professor should/could have simply told them to get in and do the exam or face zero marks. No doubt there would have been howls of protest from the students, however this would have resulted in a test of their character and subsequent life lessons in unity, division, authority and fairness.
Ugh. Having been in those more advanced CS classes, quite often the biggest problem they have involves the pile of students who supposedly passed the prerequisites but don't actually know the material. Unless you have a professor willing to just let those people fail or study outside of class, the class ends up cramming in piles of remedial material and discussions to get everyone to the same baseline.
Exactly. I knew several people in my introductory CS courses who couldn't, say, describe a linked list. There is room for testing basic concepts at courses of this level.
"Boycott" is the wrong word here. The students certainly organized themselves, but they were not boycotting -- they were taking advantage of a grading policy that creates an optimal strategy for the students if they work together and cooperate.
What these students learned by working together like this is almost certainly more important to their intellectual growth than the exam itself. The professor for the class seems to recognize that, which is also a good thing.
It seems that they were preventing other students from going in as well (at least that was the implication with the guarding of doors). So perhaps they actually learned to get what you want through coercion.
That, in my opinion, tarnished their achievement. I agree with the sentiment of what was done, but the execution was poor. It would of being a far greater achievement if they didn't enforce the choice.
I think it's an appropriate usage of the term. It's an organized effort to abstain from some specific activity, which is a broad but well-understood definition for "boycott." Nations choosing to not send competitors to the Olympics, for example, is widely called a boycott despite it not having anything to do with purchasing a product or service.
The semantic objection is not because of "purchasing" implications, but the intent behind the abstention. Nations boycott the Olympics for political reasons. The term boycott implies collective abstention to influence something outside of the standard transaction. In this case, the intent behind their abstention is inside the standard transaction: they abstained to get good grades.
<personal_anecdote>
In high school I had a physics professor who had this exact policy, except that he never imagined the consequences of everybody NOT taking the test. I did, and with the help of a friend we tried to organize the 'boycott'. It failed horribly, but at least we tried. Great story OP!
</personal_anecdote>
Not necessarily. The prof could choose to make grades relative by subtracting rather than dividing.
If that was the policy, then someone could've boycotted the boycott by going in and trying to score exactly one point on the exam, possibly after everyone else left. Then everyone else would score a 99.
It would have at least given everyone something to think about afterwards.
Impressive feat. Too bad the class wasn't in Game Theory, that would've been even more isomorphic than the Harvard Intro to Congress class incident.
EDIT: Isomorphic used in the sense of the event ("boycott", cheating) being similar in form/geist to the class taken. I'm sure there's a better word for it.
Andrew Kelly, a student in Fröhlich’s Introduction to Programming class who was one of the boycott’s key organizers, explained the logic of the students' decision via e-mail: "Handing out 0's to your classmates will not improve your performance in this course," Kelly said.
This is actually not an interesting problem from the game theory perspective: defection gains you nothing. That is, if you're the only person who defects, your situation is the same if no one had defected. I'm assuming here that the grade curving is local to the assignments. Handing out zeroes to your classmates will help if your overall number of points goes up, and overall number of points in the class determines final grade.
*quickly looks up the definition of 'isomorphism'*
Definitions of isomorphism:
Find isomorphisms at great prices!
Wait, that's not one... strangely makes me want to click through though.
1. Biology: Similarity in form, as in organisms of different ancestry.
2. Mathematics: A one-to-one correspondence between the elements of two sets such that the result of an operation on elements of one set corresponds to the result of the analogous operation on their images in the other set.
3. Chemistry: A close similarity in the crystalline structure of two or more substances of similar chemical composition.
Game theory says that no one cheating and deciding to take the final would be the obvious outcome because the students have no incentive to cheat the system. If they skip the test, they get 100. If they take the test, they get up to 100. No advantage from taking the test.
Now, if the maximum score for everyone skipping the test was lower than 100, then things would be interesting.
Everybody skipping the exam is a Nash equilibrium, but assuming perfectly rational behaviour (and that everybody has a utility function which depends solely on final exam grade) is dangerous.
This is, of course, why students turned up and waited outside to see if they needed to write the exam rather than just assuming that other students would all do the "obvious" thing.
Excellent username/post combo. What if some students believed that the professor would change his mind and change the rules when he realized what was going on?
I had a 10th grade bio teacher who always gave 50 question multiple choice exams (i.e. 2 points per question).
She always offered a 'shoot the moon' option. If you could get every question wrong you would get 100 for the exam instead of 0. Of course if you got one question correct, you would end up with just a 2 for the exam.
As I recall there were several successful attempts during the year.
I remember some friends of mine who did the same thing, except that one kid managed to sneak in and take the exam. Everyone hated him, but his class rank skyrocketed.
I find that the social bullies and self appointed dictators in social groups often try bully people into submission by shaming them for not complying with "what is good for the group". Such cowards are often hiding behind the well being of "the people" and try to make non-comformists look bad. Because if you aren't doing what is good for "the people", you somehow must be evil.
Well guess what, you don't owe people shit and they don't owe you shit. You are not responsible for other people unless you are in charge of them, working for the common goal or unless they're your family members. Your classmates are none of these things and you owe them absolutely nothing.
It's funny the way bullies will often be the first to betray the group and how it's suddenly "every man for himself" when shit hits the fan.
I don't feel this is really a "boycott" - it's not like they're objecting to him, the course, the university or the rules itself. They're just collectively exercising a loophole. I wanted to call it "conspiracy," but that implies secrecy, when the whole organization was very much in the open. Perhaps "openly collude."
Anyway, I like the reaction from the professor and the head of the CS department. It's nice to read about people reacting reasonably and seeing the forest.
"Also, since students didn’t know for sure until exam time if the boycott would be successful, they had to study for it anyway, which is a main benefit of exams,” Selinski wrote.
That makes the point of grading a student's result senseless. I don't even mean the 'boycott' but that Froehlich adapts the grades to the highest received. That would mean if everyone is lazy/stupid they'll all be evaluated better than they are. So why have a grading system in the first place if it doesn't enable you to compare results indepently.
(btw I would vote for a grade free teaching system anyways)
To me, it's a check against a teacher making an obscenely hard test that even the smartest students can't pass. The logic would be that if the best and brightest can only get a 60, then the exam should be curved.
This assumes that the best and brightest are actually really smart and knowledgeable.
It's not obvious until you try to create a test yourself that creating a fair test is hard. Particularly for an intro course, since it's material that you know so well that you barely think about it consciously anymore. I took the same approach, and I was cognizant of the fact that some of my students came in with prior programming experience.
I had a professor once (for modern physics, i.e. relativity and quantum mechanics) who said that if anyone could get 100% on his test, they'd saturate the "sensor" and make the measurement less accurate; he wanted to see the bell curve centered low enough that it didn't get clipped by the maximum score. He calibrated his tests so the highest scores would typically fall in the 50s or 60s, and then applied a curve. Actually getting 100 would require knowing all the material for that course in advance and then some.
An interesting, if nerve-wracking, philosophy. :) It's the only time I've ever left a test and not known for sure what grade I'd get.
In my Intro to Computers class we had guest speakers. One speaker/professor was in charge of statistics. Many of the first year CS students left the class. He stopped the 10th one asking where he thought he was going? The student said he had better things to do.
This enraged the professor who went on a loud rant about how this really is important and we were awful for not paying attention. He then stormed out.
A week later the usual class professor emailed all of saying we had to study the topic on our own since half the class had walked out.
I emailed her and the rest of the class that if any of his topic were on the test I would make sure they both were fired at least reprimanded.
By the offended professors own words, half the class was still there and interested in the topic. Basically, he walked out on us.
I'd have said "very well then, have a nice day." Then, at the end of the class, I'd pass around a piece of paper and tell everyone left to write their name on it. We'll call it the "I'm not a douchebag exam." Everyone present would get a 100, everyone else would get a 0.
And then I'd still have that content on the "real" exam.
Really sad story. The professor, of course, should not have walked out, what should have happened instead he should have continued teaching (even if only one student remained in class) and then have as much as possible of these topics on the test. And when people that walked out failed the course they'd have to consider if they want to retake it, this time properly, of choose something else instead.
My son had a required CS course at UC Berkeley taught by a professor who didnt want to deal with undergraduates. To discourage them he graded his exams more or less as follows: 5 points for getting an answer completely correct, no errors at all; -5 points for any error in the answer, no matter how trivial; 0 points for not answering. Not answering any question was probably a B, but there was such an uproar from the students that the class was turned into pass/fail. My son opted to take it the following semester from a different prof.
Mathematics at Cambridge is graded in a similar (but far more complicated) interesting way[1]
(This is a simplification) - Questions are graded out of 20 and can also be awarded a quality grade. Answers scoring 15 or more are awarded an alpha, those between 10 - 14 inclusive a beta. Alphas and Betas are extremely heavily weighted - the score for the top students is 30 alpha + 5 beta + raw score, so a single question scoring 15 is potentially worth 45, quality is much more important than quality, the pass/fail line is 2 alpha + 1 beta
My wife had an advanced mathematics course (University of Washington) where leaving an answer blank was worth 30% of the possible points. Any attempted answer was scored starting at 0.
This was meant to discourage hard-to-grade, crappy attempts at scoring a few points. Students would skip problems they didn't think they could answer well and focus their attention on problems where they thought they could put together a fairly solid answer.
And he is not changing his grading system for next year? Next year the students ought to try not even going to class.
The positive reinforcement and acceptance of publicity could be compared to the media making a big deal out of Columbine. Whenever bad behavior is made into a spectacle, it will be copied. I will be completely surprised if we don't see more of these events in the coming years, not just because it is possible, but because JH is being fucking stupid by publicizing this.
I had a few classes that had three exams and a final, and the grading policy dropped the lowest exam score. Even when I got 100% or more on the first two exams, and got explicitly told by the professor that the exam was optional and I didn't need to show up, I still took the last one, because why not check the knowledge I studied?
Given the intimidation factor, I'd probably end up asking the professor if I could take the exam outside of the normal class time anonymously, and leave people to guess based on who isn't in the same class the next term.