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Too many students at Holy Cross care far too much about what grades they’ve earned on last week’s assignments.
BROCKLESBY
THE SUITE LIFE
Friday, 14 September 2001
Friday, 21 September 2001
Friday, 28 September 2001
Friday, 5 October 2001
Friday, 19 October 2001
Friday, 26 October 2001
Friday, 2 November 2001
Friday, 7 December 2001
Friday, 25 January 2002
Friday, 1 March 2002
Friday, 12 April 2002
Friday, 19 April 2002
Friday, 26 April 2002
The grades handed out by History professors were actually an elaborate code designed to conceal the true grade that a work deserved.
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COMMENTS ON THE PASSING PARADE
Making Up the Grade
By Michael J. Ballway
CRUSADER FEATURES COLUMNIST
W
e care too much about the past. Someone needs to stop this disease, this sickness, this inexplicable compulsion. Too many students at Holy Cross care far too much about what grades they've earned on last week's assignments. They obsess over midterms that they took weeks ago. They derail constructive conversations with their single-minded focus on whether last month's paper met with Professor So-and-so's approval. The plague has even struck erstwhile man-without-a-care Joey Brocklesby '03, who interrupted a fine debate over the precise degree of evil represented by the 2001 A.L. Champion New York #$%@! Yankees (your faithful correspondent took the side of "extreme evil," while his roommate supported "ultimate evil") with his annoying anxiety over his grades in HIST-212, "19th Century Political History of Idaho and North Dakota." "If only I knew how well I was doing," he continually repeated, making it clear to us that his present and future well-being depended fully upon knowing whether his QPI would rise or fall if the semester were to end today. "If only I had some inkling of my current grade, as of today, it would relieve me of this worry and concern." Attempts to cure Joey of his sickness were met with considerable difficulty. We tried asking him if his October grade would show on his transcript; he looked at us blankly. We drew a comparison that he, a devoted fan of the Montréal Expos, would understand: on Opening Day, we noted, the 'Spos are rarely more than a game out of the lead in the N.L. East, yet a mere six months later they are invariably a flaming wreckage of cellar-dwelling washouts, often so far from first place that they mathematically eliminate themselves from the next year's playoffs. He failed to recognize the allusion, and began to berate us savagely for underestimating the capacity of Vlad Guerrero and Javier Vazquez to help their team rocket into the playoffs next year. We didn't doubt this, although silently we knew that such a team would not be the Expos. That is a completely separate topic, however, and we returned to the matter at hand by asking him if knowing his grade would make him try any more or any less on the next paper or exam. If he had an A right now, that is, would he not try his hardest, to preserve the A? And if he had a C right now, would he not still try his hardest, to raise it to a B? Logic, however, does not work on Holy Cross students possessed by the malevolent Grade Gnostic spirit. Knowing that we would hear no end to his wailing and gnashing of teeth unless we could somehow ascertain his present standing in class, we turned our attention to that question. Had he gotten any graded papers or exams back from the professor? As class participation is often a negligible percentage, and surely a place where grades can change in the last five weeks, his own works, returned to him annotated and marked, would form adequate guideposts pointing to his current grade. "Now, that's just the thing," he said, slowly casting a sheepish look. "I've got my midterm and two papers, right here." A midterm and two papers! We were sure that we could help him catalogue his progress, given these tools. Indeed, we questioned his own competency for not having done so already. "It's not that simple," he protested. "I've got the grades, I can see the grades, I just can't make sense of them. I think the History Department is conspiring against me." We took a look at his test and papers and found that we agreed -- the marks were completely incomprehensible. Not unfair, not illegible, simply incomprehensible. Most of us are familiar with College-sanctioned ratings such as A (excellent), B (good), C (satisfactory), D (low pass), and F (failure), and their respective pluses and minuses. But Joey's professor employed strange, mutant grades that defied attempts to categorize them. Or so we thought. Joey's assignments had notes like B++, A--, and even a strange squiggle, forcing us to reach the conclusion that the grades handed out by History professors, far from having no rhyme or reason, were actually an elaborate code designed to conceal the true grade that a work deserved. Was B++ more a B or more an A? Nobody knows -- that's the point. We made several discreet inquiries within the History Major community but ran up against brick walls. Finally, late in the afternoon, we received a cryptic note directing us to show up at midnight in the hallowed hall of History on O'Kane 3. There, pinned to the bulletin board pointed out by a shadowy man, we saw:
We snatched the note and scurried back to our Carlin base. Armed with our new guidebook, we quickly set to work on Joey's papers, uncovering the true evaluations. It turns out that he had written a very, very good exam but used parenthetical notation instead of footnotes in his paper (come on, now, you know Prucha doesn't like that). The paper with the squiggle, however, proved a tougher nut to crack. We tried and tried to identify it, looking from every possible angle, but it was Joey who found the answer. "Look," he said, "it's a lowercase Gamma, of course!" Of course? "Of course. Read her comment: 'Can't make heads or tails of your argument. I give up. It's all Greek to me.'" This article appeared in the 26 October 2001 edition of The Crusader, on page 15 (fifth page of Features section). The "Comments on the Passing Parade truck" graphic was absent for the second week running. |
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