Another important strategy I have found is not to get into disputes about specific questions. If the student does not like his or her grade, s/he may have a regrade of the entire assignment. Stress that grades can go up or down.

Finally, the best way to avoid such complaints is to do a thorough job grading the first time. For things with right or wrong answers, it’s easy. For game theory or methods classes (if this is what you teach), stress from the beginning that you are looking for proper setups and derivations even if the answer turns out to be incorrect. For papers or other written work where subjectivity may matter, have a rubric that you fill in and attach to the returned assignment. It’s a lot easier for a student to understand a 69% if he sees 5/10 for grammar, 6/10 for organization…and so on.

[A] student has about 15 minutes to make an affirmative case for more points. Pressing beyond that point (it’s happened once or twice) increases my resistance to rewarding that behavior with a higher score. At three hours, they’d get the same level of scrutiny in the future, but stop getting the benefit of the doubt.

I’ll be the first to admit that grading papers is something of a black art and every professor has his or her own pet peeves. I try to reasonably accommodate a wide range of “good college writing” but I’m probably more pedantic about some things (primarily bad usage) than most profs; on the other hand, I’ll readily make red marks on papers that don’t affect the grade in the slightest, since grading papers has both evaluative and pedagogical functions.

I adopted Michelle’s appeals policy last fall with minor tweaks and have yet to have a student appeal; a couple have asked about it but none ever followed through.

In my experience, many professors are incompetent teachers, probably because they were hired on their ability to publish and not their ability to teach. Fortunately, most professors are also not very assertive people, so I can usually push them into giving our class what we need when I try. (For example, we had a terrible Statistics professor whose lectures and homework assignments were all done using Excel—it felt more like an Excel class than a Statistics class—but the exams were going to be pencil-and-paper. We had no idea what to expect on the first exam. I asked him if he was going to give us a sample exam to help us study, and initially he said no, but after I bugged him about it in class every day for two weeks he relented and wrote up a sample exam. Students I wasn’t even acquainted with came up to me outside of class to thank me for being so pushy about it.) That’s why I was so amused by Timothy’s story, because it reminded me of my own experiences of having to pester professors into doing a better job teaching.

Michelle: I’ve had professors that have your same policy, and I’ve taken advantage of it, winning points back every time. I don’t contest every less-than-A grade (the B’s are usually the result of me half-assing an assignment and I know it, so I don’t bother) but if I legitimately think that either the exam/assignment or the grading was unfair or poorly done, I will argue my case.

Funny—I have had that impression as well.

Plus I was a computer geek long before I became a political scientist; I didn’t even know there was such a thing as quantitative social scientific research until I was a junior in college (if I had, I might have become a convert earlier; yes, I’m weird).

Poli Sci sure has changed since my days as a major.

Mind you, I’ve defended at least some of Wright’s complaints about American society previously, and there are certainly good reasons why African Americans might continue to harbor grievances about slavery, Jim Crow, and even to a lesser extent the inability of the Civil Rights Movement to deliver on its efforts to improve social as well as political equality for blacks, the last of which has less to do with the CRM itself but the political context in which it operated and continues to operate.

On Ford’s campaign, I call BS unless you have something more convincing than the silly “Playboy bunny” ad. Certainly Ford has not received anywhere near the level of racist vitriol from white Tennesseans as his white, Jewish successor, Steve Cohen, has received from blacks in his own district. And I’m not sure what you mean by “DLC pandering” or “southern politics” in reference to Ford, but admittedly I haven’t paid too close attention to his activities since leaving Congress (I saw him on MSNBC a couple of weeks ago I think but otherwise he’s off my radar).

FWIW, I’ve been in the pews under a pastor who spoke genuinely biblical sermons most of the time, but was rabidly fundamentalist in personal conversations. You can hear both. It doesn’t surprise me. What surprises me is that there’s this belief that pastors (like anyone else?) speak consistently all the time.

Before everyone goes down the Wright hole, let’s do some proper research, m’kay.

SOT, Ford is a joke and a disappointment, IMHO. He combines the worst of DLC pandering with the worst of southern politics. This is especially ironic given how he was trashed by racist politics in his campaign. You’d think he’d be a little more sensitive to the topic.

This is a huge election for DeSoto County. They’ve never had true representation in DC.