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I must say, my respect for my calculus teacher just got a big jump in the upward direction today.
I'll admit, at first, I was a bit reserved about him. He's a new guy, meaning he's still getting the hang of things here, and all that entails. He doesn't even have a Digipen website yet, which is why I linked the lsu site he gave us. Also, as he's originally from Greece, he speaks with a thick accent which makes it challenging to understand what he's saying from time to time. Though he's not as bad as some teachers I've had in the past with regards to the accent thing, I'll give him that. And, lastly, on Monday he gave us the first of presumably 10 or 11 pop-quizzes this semester. I am not a fan of pop quizzes at all.
Well, it was because of this quiz that things went down today like they did. I took the quiz on Monday and, at first, was like oh man I'm going to bomb this since I haven't studied at all yet. Well, after I got finished with it, I got to feeling that I'd done better than I thought I had, so maybe it wasn't so bad after all. Then, when he went over the quiz answers in class later after everyone had finished, my feeling of not totally screwing up was bolstered even more.
I came in to class this morning and he was handing the quizzes back. I got mine and saw that I had a score of 6 out of 20. WTF? Surely I didn't do that badly...? Well, to begin with, I got to looking at it to see what was up. Okay, first of all, there were 5 questions on the quiz. Each was 4 points a piece. For questions 1 and 3, I had the full 4 points marked, and for question 4 I had 2 points partial credit marked. Now, I don't claim to be a mathematical genius or anything here, but this much math I do know: 4+4+2 != 6. For questions 2 and 5 I had 0 points. No partial credit or anything. For question 2, I knew where I'd screwed up the first part of the problem (simple arithmetic error), but the second part still looked right to me. And for question 5, I had at least gotten the formula down correctly, so that should've counted for something, I'd have thought. >_>
So, when he gave us a 5 minute break halfway through class, I showed the quiz to him. It turns out that the grader that he has for our section of the class simply wasn't following the teacher's directions. The teacher said that he had instructed the grader to give a bit of partial credit if there was at least some work shown, even if it was all wrong. He said the grader for the other section of the class, a different guy, had done this correctly, unlike our grader. Also, after I showed him my problem 2, he agreed that what I had was at least partially correct and bumped it up some more. And, of course, he acknowledged that 4+4+2 actually equals 10 and not 6, which was also due to an error on the grader's part. So, when all was said and done, I went from having a 6/20 to having a 13/20, which isn't great, but is much more like what I had expected to get. I was not the only person who had similar problems, so he took us all back to his office after class and got things sorted out.
He also told a pretty awesome story about cheating. (Unnervingly, he brought this up when I first showed him my quiz. ¬_¬ But, admittedly, I do see the potential similarities between my situation and the one in his story, though, so I'll let it slide and not take it as that he was accusing me of cheating or anything like that. ^^;) Well, anyway, the story was that some girl at his last school had brought a quiz to him with the "correct" answers on it, and was asking him why he had marked them wrong. It turned out that she had simply changed the answers to the correct ones later and was trying to pass it off that she had been right all along. He, of course, noticed this because, really, why would he have marked it wrong and wrote a bunch of comments on the quiz concerning why it had been wrong if it hadn't actually been wrong? Well, he didn't make an issue of it this time. However, he suspected that she would try to do the same thing the next time, so on the next quiz before he handed them back, he made a photocopy of her quiz. Sure enough, later she came by with the "correct" answers, asking him if he had something against her or if he didn't like her or something, since he obviously kept marking her "correct" answers wrong. To which he replied, "No, I don't like you that much" and pulled out the copy of her quiz and showed it to her. Busted. It ended up going to the dean of the school, and she could have gotten kicked out if the teacher hadn't decided to be lenient about it (and, in my opinion, maybe a bit too lenient).
He ended the story by telling us that if we're going to cheat, we should do it with class and style, because he doesn't have respect for amateurs. ^^; To paraphrase his words, he claims to "respect the guy who can steal 50 million dollars from a bank, but not the guy who just steals two dollars from a neighbor".
I'll admit, at first, I was a bit reserved about him. He's a new guy, meaning he's still getting the hang of things here, and all that entails. He doesn't even have a Digipen website yet, which is why I linked the lsu site he gave us. Also, as he's originally from Greece, he speaks with a thick accent which makes it challenging to understand what he's saying from time to time. Though he's not as bad as some teachers I've had in the past with regards to the accent thing, I'll give him that. And, lastly, on Monday he gave us the first of presumably 10 or 11 pop-quizzes this semester. I am not a fan of pop quizzes at all.
Well, it was because of this quiz that things went down today like they did. I took the quiz on Monday and, at first, was like oh man I'm going to bomb this since I haven't studied at all yet. Well, after I got finished with it, I got to feeling that I'd done better than I thought I had, so maybe it wasn't so bad after all. Then, when he went over the quiz answers in class later after everyone had finished, my feeling of not totally screwing up was bolstered even more.
I came in to class this morning and he was handing the quizzes back. I got mine and saw that I had a score of 6 out of 20. WTF? Surely I didn't do that badly...? Well, to begin with, I got to looking at it to see what was up. Okay, first of all, there were 5 questions on the quiz. Each was 4 points a piece. For questions 1 and 3, I had the full 4 points marked, and for question 4 I had 2 points partial credit marked. Now, I don't claim to be a mathematical genius or anything here, but this much math I do know: 4+4+2 != 6. For questions 2 and 5 I had 0 points. No partial credit or anything. For question 2, I knew where I'd screwed up the first part of the problem (simple arithmetic error), but the second part still looked right to me. And for question 5, I had at least gotten the formula down correctly, so that should've counted for something, I'd have thought. >_>
So, when he gave us a 5 minute break halfway through class, I showed the quiz to him. It turns out that the grader that he has for our section of the class simply wasn't following the teacher's directions. The teacher said that he had instructed the grader to give a bit of partial credit if there was at least some work shown, even if it was all wrong. He said the grader for the other section of the class, a different guy, had done this correctly, unlike our grader. Also, after I showed him my problem 2, he agreed that what I had was at least partially correct and bumped it up some more. And, of course, he acknowledged that 4+4+2 actually equals 10 and not 6, which was also due to an error on the grader's part. So, when all was said and done, I went from having a 6/20 to having a 13/20, which isn't great, but is much more like what I had expected to get. I was not the only person who had similar problems, so he took us all back to his office after class and got things sorted out.
He also told a pretty awesome story about cheating. (Unnervingly, he brought this up when I first showed him my quiz. ¬_¬ But, admittedly, I do see the potential similarities between my situation and the one in his story, though, so I'll let it slide and not take it as that he was accusing me of cheating or anything like that. ^^;) Well, anyway, the story was that some girl at his last school had brought a quiz to him with the "correct" answers on it, and was asking him why he had marked them wrong. It turned out that she had simply changed the answers to the correct ones later and was trying to pass it off that she had been right all along. He, of course, noticed this because, really, why would he have marked it wrong and wrote a bunch of comments on the quiz concerning why it had been wrong if it hadn't actually been wrong? Well, he didn't make an issue of it this time. However, he suspected that she would try to do the same thing the next time, so on the next quiz before he handed them back, he made a photocopy of her quiz. Sure enough, later she came by with the "correct" answers, asking him if he had something against her or if he didn't like her or something, since he obviously kept marking her "correct" answers wrong. To which he replied, "No, I don't like you that much" and pulled out the copy of her quiz and showed it to her. Busted. It ended up going to the dean of the school, and she could have gotten kicked out if the teacher hadn't decided to be lenient about it (and, in my opinion, maybe a bit too lenient).
He ended the story by telling us that if we're going to cheat, we should do it with class and style, because he doesn't have respect for amateurs. ^^; To paraphrase his words, he claims to "respect the guy who can steal 50 million dollars from a bank, but not the guy who just steals two dollars from a neighbor".
