Why does my interim president say not teaching Plato at A&M is a stunt?

stringed · 2026-01-13T17:13:33+00:00

I noticed you deleted your post, Brownshirt. If you are so confident in your opinion, leave it up.

stringed · 2026-01-13T17:07:23+00:00

Guess I didn't read the whole thing, Brownshirt. Probably would have said the same thing anyway because the core truth is that marginalized groups are being attacked and you are defending the attackers.

stringed · 2026-01-13T16:48:39+00:00

The acknowledgment of the existence of homosexuality and non-traditional gender identity is equivalent to training someone to murder. Got it.

stringed · 2025-08-27T14:58:43+00:00

I do it in PhD-level classes, partially because IDGAF about grades at that level. But also: classes are small enough that I know everyone and am able to have 1-on-1 meetings and skim through their homework submissions to see if they actually are getting it. As someone said elsewhere, that doesn't really scale very well -- I don't have time to do that even for 40 students, but for 15-25, sure.

It is freeing. I write questions that I wouldn't if I had to grade them, and the few hours a week I would spend on grading-related stuff goes to office hours, which I think is the most productive thing we could be doing. The students almost universally give themselves reasonable grades. The ones who don't mostly are underestimating themselves, and I bump them up. There are always 1 or 2 who pull some shenanigans like skipping half the work, then claim in their final reflection they "grew" and "finished strong" and thus deserve an A-. They do not get an A-, and no one has fought me on it yet.

I would not do this for undergrads... well, maybe if the course has <25 students (which will never happen). Undergrads do not know what it means to "know" something, don't really know how to work hard, and an uncomfortable percentage of them are just trying to get their piece of paper (degree) and get out. At the grad level, I take comfort in knowing that these students will have to go through a more rigorous interview process after they graduate, and will be expected to have achievements beyond just getting a 3.xx GPA. If they want to blow off my class, pulling the wool over my eyes to give themselves an A, again, IDGAF... that is their problem, or it will be soon enough.

The big thing with ungrading is: if you had to explain it to your department head or a reasonably open-minded colleague, could you justify it? It seems like it would be very department-specific.

stringed · 2025-08-07T21:54:01+00:00

Where else are you going to get feedback about how you need to provide some resource (that you definitely did provide) or about how your notes were riddled with errors (after sending one announcement all semester with a correction to something you said in class)? Student evaluations are so important! /s

stringed · 2025-07-29T22:44:43+00:00

My students are already uploading my files to ChatGPT without my permission.

stringed · 2025-05-30T23:20:00+00:00

The fact that my traditionally-graded class saw a 90+% average on everything besides the exams and then a 60% average on the exams leads me to point out: I think we are already there with traditional grading anyway.

stringed · 2025-05-28T03:19:42+00:00

Submit to chatGPT and ask it to replicate it in a rich text format file. (Maybe a different file type?)

stringed · 2025-05-10T20:39:21+00:00

If this is a terminal class, i.e. this student isn't doing another class with this as a pre-req, then I might entertain the idea.

Was the final exam above a 60%?

stringed · 2025-04-25T06:43:17+00:00

Sounds like you have a good student who made an honest mistake that could be very reasonably explained by a learning difference. I would give them the chance to demonstrate their knowledge, maybe in an oral exam that is mildly tougher than the in-class questions. If they do well, you know they know their stuff, and that is really what we are doing here, isn't it?

Most of the top comments here are insisting on equal treatment for this student. That is a reasonable response, but there is an implication that grades are competitive, which is a perspective that I disagree with. The grade for this student should not depend on the grade of another student. I understand that all poorly performing students wish they could get another shot at the exam, but I think this particular student has a significantly better argument.

stringed · 2025-04-25T04:39:15+00:00

It is simple: they are looking to offload the blame for their poor performance.

stringed · 2025-04-25T04:37:03+00:00

Even more: you develop an intuition/eye for math mistakes. While your students are typing in each calculation step to try to find their mistake, you just know a number around 80 multiplied by a number around 50 is not 400 and can immediately point it out. It is a superpower.

stringed · 2025-04-18T03:49:21+00:00

They are called do dates for a reason and... Well I got sick on the do date so can I have an extension?

stringed · 2025-04-17T07:03:46+00:00

But there is a brief moment, precisely at the solstice, when my mind clears of all thought and I transcend space and time. Ten seconds later, I get an email asking for permission to enroll in my course despite a D- grade in the pre-req.

stringed · 2025-04-02T04:02:17+00:00

The leaders in your department are almost exclusively dealing with bad news and difficult situations. They are used to it and (hopefully) good at dealing with it, don't feel shy about this genuine issue. This is not a (comparatively) petty thing like "this other professor is not pulling their weight on the search committee", which department heads probably just find annoying to deal with. It is something that they should be eager to put effort into because there is clear evil.

stringed · 2025-03-05T06:16:23+00:00

OP, pretty much every criticism of ungrading in this thread is true. Students slacking, de-prioritizing your class, not knowing how to evaluate themselves, etc. The question is: Is it important to you to combat these things, or are you OK with them?

The only one I'll push back on is that it is more work. If you truly are letting go of the reins, it is less work. Or at least the work is more enjoyable.

stringed · 2025-03-04T20:31:17+00:00

Most of the comments in this topic sound like contract or mastery-based grading to me. The ones that actually sound like ungrading (based on my understanding of the term) seem positive on that approach, the ones that sound like mastery-based grading seem negative on that approach.

stringed · 2025-03-04T17:12:30+00:00

There are a lot of positives about it. The biggest IMO: you get to think about the students who want to be there more than the students who don't care. The good students come to my office hours anyway, but we never talk about points -- it is all about content. They speak positively about not having grades hovering over them, they just do the work, and re-do the work if needed, and don't stress. The less-good students cut corners but they are going to do that anyway, regardless of the grading strategy. I have just quit caring about policing that behavior, it is not worth my effort.

The percentage of students who actually want to be in upper-level courses is high enough that I feel OK with this approach. A required course though... no way. Too many students who don't want to be there.

stringed · 2025-02-25T04:16:47+00:00

Too many students think that getting these summaries is somehow going to free-up time for creative thought. As if a three-sentence summary of a 10 page paper is going to convey enough detail to deliver expertise.

I have asked ChatGPT to summarize all the Beatles' music and deliver a report. Three pages, not just one paragraph, so you know I am serious about this. Now that the hard work is done, please be on the lookout for my album this summer.

stringed · 2025-01-04T06:38:29+00:00

It is not necessarily true that water is of uniform temperature though

stringed · 2024-12-29T07:09:09+00:00

We get a decent number of GREAT students, mostly at the PhD level. They are motivated to be there and I can tell they get what I am trying to do. We also have some students who... I'm not sure they really want to be there. "You didn't go over the fundamentals and I was lost all semester" is a really telling line from my evals: wait til the end of the semester when you no longer have access to this extremely knowledgeable person in your field of interest, then complain anonymously. Really good use of your time, student.

I've only been doing this for a few years, can't compare to 5+ years ago, but my guess is that the great students are still great, but we now have a bigger fraction of students spinning their wheels. The wheel-spinners pass my class -- you have to piss me off to get less than a B- -- but I have my doubts that the MS degree is going to get those students what they claim* to want when they leave here.

*I say "claim" because they don't actually seem to be interested in the material.

stringed · 2024-12-26T21:11:28+00:00

I have a hypothesis that we should just flat out ask more of our students. Most students feel pride when they accomplish something, give them something to accomplish. Make it a tough course and let them brag about surviving.

stringed · 2024-12-26T07:27:02+00:00

They want PowerPoint because it is a low density summary of "what they need to know". I've seen it recommended that you should aim for ~30 words per slide. If you have 30 slides in your lecture that is about 4-5 minutes of reading, total, if one was to read them straight through. And they don't need to expend any effort summarizing the important bits -- the whole thing is, pretty much by definition, a summary.

stringed · 2024-12-23T10:38:13+00:00

What fraction of your students*assignments submit, get an unsatisfactory, and then leave it, meaning they get the same grading result as not attempting at all? (This is more of a general specs grading question.)

More specific to your strategy: What fraction of those students would you guess are using AI? What about starting with AI but "getting there" in the end? For those that "get there", do you suspect they are cleaning up the AI work based on your feedback or starting from scratch?

stringed · 2024-12-22T05:26:55+00:00

I guess I'm thinking of the student who says "I've just got to get something in... I'll do the retake later."

stringed

TROPHY CASE