The zero-to-100 trick

In the news not long ago: at John Hopkins University, students in one professor’s computer-programming classes received grades of 100 on their final exams after refusing to take the exams. The professor was grading on a curve, with the highest exam grade in each class becoming a 100 and other grades bumped up accordingly. So with a highest grade of zero — you know the rest. The Johns Hopkins students have been praised for initiative and teamwork: whether they were working as a cheerful community or a dastardly cabal, I cannot say. But I can say that they should not have received 100s.

Not because they have cheated: academic misconduct is not in any obvious way the problem here. The Johns Hopkins students collaborated, but collaboration is not necessarily forbidden, as when students study together for an exam. These students showed no intention to deceive: they didn’t share answers or use unacknowledged sources or purchase work from a term-paper mill. Indeed, the students were transparent in their intentions, standing in the hallways to check whether anyone went in to take an exam (and prepared to take the exam if necessary). There is, in any event, something odd about a charge of academic misconduct in the absence of academic work.

One can argue, as many observers have, that all these students did was to exploit a loophole in a grading policy. But such observers have overlooked important points about the workings of a curve. A curve assumes that students are making a genuine effort to do well in a course by doing its work. If that condition doesn’t hold, a curve becomes a joke, as students can decide as a group to answer, say, just one question each for an exam or assignment. More important: a curve applies only to students who have done the work. A student who doesn’t take an exam when other students do receives a zero, not a grade based on the others’ performance (a grade in the single digits perhaps, instead of a zero).

We can assume that the professor’s syllabi said nothing about these points. They are rightly left as tacit understandings shared by the members of an academic community, understandings that fall under the handy, all-encompassing alligator rule. You don’t write essays in Morse code. You don’t read novels in an English class in Spanish translation. You don’t show up for a 2:00 exam in the wee small hours of the morning, even if the professor left out p.m. You don’t get any grade other than a zero if you don’t take an exam. And guess what: the Johns Hopkins students knew that. As one of them explained in an e-mail, “Handing out 0’s to your classmates will not improve your performance in this course.” In other words, if just one student were to take the exam, those who didn’t would receive zeros, because a curve does not apply to an exam not taken. And if no one takes an exam, there are no grades to curve.

And if it doesn’t go without saying, you don’t bring an alligator to class, or a typewriter.

When I first posted about this incident, my response was indignation. I said that the organizers and those who went along with them should be ashamed. For getting 100s, yes. But only now do I realize that even in my indignation, I didn’t recommend zeros. I think that the best response to the zero-to-100 trick would have been neither a reward nor a punishment but an acknowledgement of the students’ cleverness — touché — and rescheduled examinations. Such a response would have permitted the students to maintain their intellectual integrity, if not their perfect grades.

[Thanks to Curtis Corlew, who wrote about the alligator rule in this comment. Unlike the John Hopkins e-mailer, I follow Garner’s Modern American Usage in pluralizing numbers: -s with no apostrophe.]

Luncheonette, 1936

[“Sign outside luncheonette on Skid Row.” Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Los Angeles, 1936. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Bottom left: “MAKING OUR OWN PIES NOW.” Does that news allay fear, or stoke it?

Two more Eisenstaedt lunch photographs
Angela Lansbury and Basil Rathbone
Chock full o’Nuts lunch hour

Partners in Glass

[Click for a larger, creepier view.]

The New York Times reports on a venture capital partnership for Google Glass apps.

Flashback: Mark Hurst’s thoughts about Google Glass are worth reading.

Farewell, 45 West 53rd

The New York Times reports that the building that began life in 2001 as New York’s American Folk Art Museum is to be torn down and replaced by another building. Andrew S. Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation:

“It’s very rare that a building that recent comes down, especially a building that was such a major design and that got so much publicity when it opened for its design — mostly very positive. The building is so solid looking on the street, and then it becomes a disposable artifact. It’s unusual and it’s tragic because it’s a notable work of 21st century architecture by noteworthy architects who haven’t done that much work in the city, and it’s a beautiful work with the look of a handcrafted facade.”

Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art:

“We bought the site, and our responsibility is to use the site intelligently.”

The building now standing at 45 West 53rd Street is a beautiful work. Its imminent destruction is a shame. I am reminded of what I have seen in my old Brooklyn neighborhood and my old New Jersey suburb: houses purchased and destroyed so that new owners can build whatever. Intelligent use: not.

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May 9: The Times reports that the Museum of Modern Art is reconsidering. But: “One person involved in the plans, who was not authorized to comment and therefore spoke on condition of anonymity, said that MoMA was still likely to arrive at the same conclusion.”

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January 8, 2014: The Times reports that the American Folk Art Museum is to be demolished.

[Someday I will have to tell the story of my 2002 trip to the museum for a Henry Darger exhibit and a John Ashbery reading.]

Bar graph

[Official results, from a very small election. Click for a larger, more detailed view.]

Sometimes a bar graph isn’t needed. The decimals suggest to me that the maker may have been indulging a sense of humor, but I can’t be sure.

Young man with an umbrella

[Henry, April 11, 2013.]

Another gum machine, another dowdy streetscape.

And speaking of the dowdy: I remember when umbrellas only came in Large. Carrying an umbrella on a day that turned out to hold no rain became, at least for my younger self, an exercise in acute self-consciousness.

Other Henry posts
Betty Boop with Henry : Henry, an anachronism : Henry and a gum machine : Henry at the shoe repairman : Henry buys liverwurst : Henry, getting things done : Henry mystery : Henry’s repeated gesture

Local weather

We have rain, plenty. And a local television station has two — two — meteorologists on tonight’s news.

To borrow from Tip O’Neill: all weather is local. Stay safe, east-central Illinois.

A related post
The weatherman’s reply to the shepherd

[From the television: “. . . a battle zone of air masses.”]

Free-font sites

From Creative Bloq: twenty-five sites for free fonts. Free and legit, that is. I especially like Impallari’s Cabin Font.

I’ll add two more sites: those of Friedrich Althausen and Jos Buivenga. Althausen’s Vollkorn and Buivenga’s Fontin Sans are two of my favorite fonts for documents.

Little Outliner

Little Outliner is a free, browser-based outliner. I never make outlines, but I do ask students to map paragraphs using the Christensen method, and Little Outliner is perfect for doing that work on the big screen.

Found via One Thing Well.

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April 17: From the same developer, Fargo is a outliner that syncs with Dropbox. And if you’d like a Dropbox invitation (another .5 GB free storage), click here.

Found via Taking Note Now.

A typewriter film

“A film about a machine and the people who love, use and repair it”: The Typewriter (In the 21st Century), by Christopher Lockett and Gary Nicholson. Here’s the trailer.

Related reading
All typewriter posts (Pinboard)