A Northeastern University student demanded her tuition money back after discovering her business professor was secretly using AI to create course materials. Ella Stapleton, who graduated this year, grew suspicious when she noticed telltale signs of AI generation in her professor's lecture notes, inc...
There are some really good reasons to make changes, not trying to say that this was the case in the parent comment, but there are certainly cases where this makes sense. About halfway through my discrete math final my professor wrote a curve on the board based on exam results from the other test session. He realized that he hadn’t properly taught some concepts and he thought it would be unfair for us to suffer because of his mistakes. Should he have been forced to stick to a non curved exam because he hadn’t announced it in the rubric or to the first exam session?
Though even in that case, the people in the class where the material wasn’t taught properly get a pass without necessarily understanding that material. On the one hand, it’s not fair for them to be punished for the prof’s mistake, but on the other hand, it’s not necessarily a good thing to give them credit for something they don’t know. It could hurt the credibility of the degree itself, similarly to the ones where you’ll get the diploma as long as you pay the bills.
People who hire the free pass people see they lack the skills despite having the paper saying they have them and stop hiring people with those credentials. It’s the same reason why cheating is dealt with so harshly.
The skills and knowledge are the whole point, not getting high marks or everything being fair. That said, it would be a difficult situation to deal with because being fair should still be a part of the equation, I just disagree about it being the most important part.
Another scenario for changing the rubric would be if the people running the course realized that something they thought was important for determining competence was actually trivial. This one could also be complex to handle fairly.
There definately good reasons to allow making judgement calls, but I wouldnt be complaining if that all they use that freedom for.
Most of the time if you asked for some exception they would allow you to drop the class without issue. So they wont break the rubric to make the class easier, but they will to make the class harder. And thats what I take issue with.
On one of my finals the professor said “you all did too well on the midterm, so I changed the final to be on meaningless details in the reading to test your comprehension and only your final grades matter” so we could fail despite learing everything we set out to learn.
I had an engineering ethics professor tell me I could I turn in the first assignment late on the second day of class, but after the final she said my grade was entirely dependant on the first assignment and it was late so I got zero points and failed the class. They have a quota of students to fail and they just pick people to fail and come up with bullshit after. They use their unchecked liberties to screw the students out of their money and nothing more in my experience.