During my 25 year career as a teaching professor at Arizona State University, I evaluated thousands of written assignments. The hardest ones were where the student plagiarized as you had to try and document it or when the student did not follow the assignment\u2019s direction very well. Again in the latter case, you need to carefully document how the essay erred. When you give students low grades, you also document as it\u2019s more probable they might complain if they don\u2019t understand the reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When a student disagrees with the grade, they can ask a faculty member to re-evaluate their work and sometimes this leads to an adjustment, but usually if that occurs it\u2019s modest. Then there is a formal grade appeal process. The grade appeal leads to someone else or a group of others getting testimony from the student and the instructor and determining a recommended course of action. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a faculty member when you receive a paper that does not address what was expected, you can consider asking the student to rewrite it, but barring exceptional circumstances to be fair you would have to make that opportunity open to everyone\u2013so it\u2019s not a course of action often done\u2013especially if that\u2019s not clearly detailed as an option in the assignment or the syllabus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the University of Oklahoma academics and the place of the instructor was undercut for political expediency due to the fallout created when a student, rather than go through the appropriate procedure, instead decided to post her complaint on social media<\/a> and it got picked up by Turning Point USA and some Republican politicians, including the Governor of Oklahoma, who turned it into a crusade against the instructor for violating the student\u2019s religious freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The University has now gone to new lows by punishing the instructor by removing them from further teaching<\/a>. This entire sequence of events is appalling\u2013regardless of your religious beliefs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best place to start is to look at the actual paper and assignment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I had received this student\u2019s paper and had made the same assignment with the same grading rubric, how would I have handled it? While I would not have given the student a zero (which occurred in this case), I still would have failed the student for failing to adequately detail a level of interaction with the assigned reading and instead substituting a more casual, insufficiently nuanced, reading and a focus on the student\u2019s religious beliefs that had nothing to do with the assignment. This I will demonstrate was not a hard call\u2013and that the University of Oklahoma gave the student a pass and instead punished the faculty member for doing their job is highly disconcerting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s start with the course PSY2603 Lifespan Development, which is a 200-level (2nd year) course that has as a prerequisite Introduction to Psychology. so students have some general background coming into the course<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next let\u2019s focus on the required reading: Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence<\/a> by Jennifer A. Jewell and Christia Spears Brown from the University of Kentucky that appeared in the Journal Social Development in 2014. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s the abstract: <\/p>\n\n\n\n The current study examines whether being high in gender typicality is associated with popularity, whether being low in gender typicality is associated with rejection\/teasing, and whether teasing due to low gender typicality mediates the association with negative mental health. Middle school children (34 boys and 50 girls) described hypothetical popular and rejected\/teased peers, and completed self\u2010report measures about their own gender typicality, experiences with gender\u2010based teasing, depressive symptoms, anxiety, self\u2010esteem, and body image. Participants also completed measures about their peers’ gender typicality, popularity, and likeability. Results indicated that popular youth were described as more gender typical than rejected\/teased youth. Further, being typical for one’s gender significantly predicted being rated as popular by peers, and this relationship was moderated by gender. Finally, low gender typicality predicted more negative mental health outcomes for boys. These relationships were, at times, mediated by experiences with gender\u2010based teasing, suggesting that negative mental health outcomes may be a result of the social repercussions of being low in gender typicality rather than a direct result of low typicality. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u201c Gender typicality\u201d relates to how well a person\u2019s expression of self matches up with gender norms that middle schoolers have learned through socialization and the authors suggest it\u2019s best seen as on a continuum from typical to atypical since there are many nuanced aspects of gender performance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n