What should my friend do about this teacher?

Get a third check on the papers from another private source just for verification. If it's just one professor against another it could seem rather weak. But if there is more than one it could hold some weight. Can past students be dug up who have had to do the same and then went on to receive higher marks? In essence, cover all the bases and be as covert as possible. And by all means go to the Dean of the Department. Is there access to reviews by students of the first professor? And wait until the final grade is turned in before going to the Dean. Yeah I would stick it to the first professor, there's no need for professors to act as the first professor has done.

 

Do NOT take it straight to the Dean. Most schools have an established grade appeal process, and very rarely does it start with the Dean. If your friend takes the issue straight to the top, side-stepping the established process, that friend will annoy the Dean, the professor and word will get around to other professors that your friend is a troublemaker.

Have your friend check and find out what the established grade appeal process is. It's good that she saved her papers, as what usually happens is an appeals panel will look at the work to determine if it was graded fairly or unfairly. Just an FYI though, most schools side with the prof automatically in grade appeals situations.

 

This isn't really a grade appeal, however. It's an inquiry into unfair grading practices. The grade appeal process doesn't really address the wider problems it appears Tim's friend is trying to get at (downgrading athletes). The other explanation is, of course, that this is a discrepancy not about athletics, but about the rigor each professor expects from his/her students.

IMO, she should seek a meeting with the department chair or the chair of the department's curriculum committee. The key to being taken seriously in this kind of inquiry is not to go in seeking to get the D wiped off the transcript but to resolve the confusion resulting from the wildly divergent grades. I would advise her to not even bring up the athletic discrimination argument in such a meeting. The administrative process will get to that.

A warning is in order though. Many schools consider the dual submission of papers without informing the professor to be a breach of academic honesty, and she could face troubles for that. In the meeting, she would have to acknowledge that up front.

 

This is where I totally lost sympathy. If I were the teacher of that new class and learned about this, your friend would have a nice F to complement her D.

FYI, turning in the same paper to multiple classes does nothing to combat supposed bias against athletes. You should tell her to shut up, do her homework, and thank her lucky starts that she got As she didn't at all deserve.

 

I would only question why these complaints and suspicions are coming out ex post facto. Did she approach the professor to inquire into the substance behind her grades when the class was going on? Did she ask how she could improve her essays? There seems to be a bit of playing the victim going on here.

Maybe her former professor has high standards and high expectations for the work the students can do while her current one has given up and checked out. It's far less trouble, after all, to just hand out A's, they result in few grade appeals.

I'm not saying that's what your friend did, but in your telling, she's stragely passive in the face of her initial 'D'

 

I asked around during my lunch break to see what would be done here, and the procedure would be to go to the department chair, who will then decide the next course of action, which may be a trip to the Dean of Students to initiate the complaint process. However, having turned in the same papers twice, without the consent of either teacher, would result in a warning for the student, too, so it would be six of one, half dozen of the other.

Now, if she's willing to (literally, in this case) take one for the team, then she could go forward. And while such a "no double dipping" policy might not be universal, one has been in effect everywhere I'd taught (in fact, a student in the creative writing class I'm teaching had to get written permission from this thesis director to re-use similar material from his thesis in my CW class, even though his use of the material is going to require substantial rewriting in order to make it appropriate for this new context).

In my experience (and I'm willing to defer to TCMahoney on the specifics here, since he actually knows the people involved, but anyway...) these cases are just as likely to be about the second teacher's shoddy standards as the first teacher's vendettas. Again... that's in my experience and I'm not claiming it has any bearing in this case. And in neither case does it speak highly of the teaching profession.

 

(a) She got Ds on these papers and believed that those poor grades were the result of a prejudice which, quite frankly, is very fishy. Athletes? If the teacher had previous experiences with athletes who bought papers, etc., then maybe some prejudice exists, but this is a community college. Do they even have athletic scholarships there? How would the teacher be able to identify who was and who wasn't an athlete?

(b) That your friend double-dipped some of her papers casts more doubt on whether she was really facing discimination in the first place.

(c) She got Ds on these papers but used them again?

 

I don't know what your problem is. She did not copy the work but just turned work from her in again. If that is good enough for the teacher, that should be it? Why does someone have to redo the exact same things? I mean, if the questions were different with the other teacher she did not answer them and therefor would have gotten worse grades.
If I work through all my next year's mathbook in the summer vacation, and than don't do the homework my teacher gave me because I allready did it, it would be ok, that's the same thing.
If a teacher asks you to learn vocabulary, and she asks you those in two different tests, you have all the vocabulary memorized the 1st time and don't learn for the 2nd test. Would that be cheating???
That's exactly what she did.

 

She should shag him.

 

It's intellectually lazy. Furthermore, whether it's good enough for the teacher is beside the point--one attends school with the expectation that he or she will improve him or herself.
I have to admit that I'm completely puzzled as to why someone would recycle papers that didn't get good grades in the first place.
I must admit that I also simply find it tacky.

But I like this solution best of all.

 

Have to say, can't agree with you here. I don't see the problem of turning in your own work again. So long as its your own work - why not? Especially for the same class?
We've all had professors who, for some reason or another, didn't like us. I know I have.

 

hell I turned the same paper in to three different classes one year,,,honestly can say the paper got very high marks each time...if its your work,,go for it. i think the first poster got it correct,,,before i did anything I would go to another professor and have them look at it. if they say its a high b or a paper then I would put up a stink about it

 

You're free to do this, but I'm sure it violates the academic honesty code at your institution. Beyond this technical, don't break the rules, reason, it's intellectually lazy. Professors assign papers (in theory) to get you to explore your thinking about a subject and to (gasp) learn. Merely turning in the same paper again and again isn't in the spirit of education, more importantly, it's shortchanging yourself.

Unless you don't care about your education and are just in school for the credential.

 

So if you are fluent in spanish, and a teacher asks you to learn spanish vocabulary, but you don't learn it and still get an A on it at next day's test it would be cheating or against the institution rules?
Man am I happy to be here...

 

We're talking specifically about some policies concerning using the same work for different classes... usually written work. As to the example above, if you enroll in a Spanish course that is too easy for you, you're not breaking any rules, just wasting your money.

 

Re: turning in the same papers...

Merely re-printing the same paper and turning it in is not ethical. However, incredibly effective re-writing happens when one puts an essay down for a period of time and returns to clean up the essay. In general, the higher up one gets in academia (lower division, upper division, MA, PhD, Post-doc, assistant prof, associate prof, full prof, university prof) the MORE that one reworks old ideas and "turns in" the same paper. Hell, there's not ONE professor that hasn't done this. The vast majority of dissertations start out from a "term-paper" in grad school. many academic articles are re-worked ideas from grad school. Or re-worked ideas from conferences, etc.

Re: prejudice vs. athletes

Even at comm colleges, it exists. Some of my comm college profs openly stated their shock that I was smart b/c I was an athlete.

I was most confronted with this while teaching as a grad student at UCLA. One prof who came from the 'hood, totally down w/ the peeps, who quoted Tupac in reverence, expressed annoyance w/ 3 big-name athletes in his lecture class, saying that they walked in all arrogant and expected special treatment. I swear on my grandmother's grave that that was absolutely not the case. They were extremely humble and asked for nothing from us. The sad thing is that this was in a meeting w/ several other profs and t.a.'s (it was a freshman humanities-core class), and they all agreed. Given that the 3 athletes in question were in MY F'ING SECTION, I defended them and asked for more specific info.

Nobody had any concrete examples.

So I asked that they be treated like normal students.

But it was sad and strange to see the nerds (profs/grad students) go at it w/ the jocks. It was as if high school had never ended.

Now, what to do? Appeal the grade, be sure to take out any venom regarding the mistreatment of athletes. Have the papers stand on their own merit.

Also, know that it is quite, quite common to have one teacher give a paper a B- while another gives it an A-. It really depends on what the individual esteems. It ends up working out in the long run. And in the long run, success in college can be found by developing your own style that meets universal criteria for quality writing.

 

Not to get to far afield, but to follow up on Carlos' point about athletes. I worked as a tutor in the LSU athletic department in the mid '80s, and every athlete I worked with got the job done (that includes the likes of Albert Belle, back when he was Joey Belle, incidently). That might've been because I worked mostly with the baseball players whose coach, Skip Bertman, insisted that they hit the books hard, telling them that if they aren't concentrating in a history class at 10:30 a.m. on a wednesday morning, why should he assume they'll be concentrating in the 7th inning of the second game of a double header on saturday afternoon?

Now here's the weird thing. My wife and I now work at a college that competes in NAIA division II, with a highly successful men's basketball program. Those guys on that team are uniformly decent and hardworking. They're the exception here, though. For reasons we can't figure out, most athletes here actually do come in as arrogant. An athlete told my wife last week that she needed to provide extra tutoring for him, or give him breaks on grades, because he needed to stay eligible for lacrosse. (The kid subsequently met with the Dean of Students, and at least pretended his priorities were straight after that). I had a women's soccer player last semester tell me she couldn't be bothered making up the work she missed for a game. I have no idea how the "D" she got as a result altered her eligibility, and I don't really care.

So it's odd how these cultures develop. I mean, at LSU (and UCLA), you have athletes who could conceivably make tremendous amounts of money playing their sports after college, and in my experience, surprisingly few attitude problems. And yet here, some place where NO ONE is EVER going to be played to pay their game (well, there's a basketball player who might play in Europe), we have a significant number of athletes who act like this college exists solely for them to play their sport for four more years after high school, and this school crap is for losers. I don't get it, myself.

Well, yes I do, but I would have to give a complete synopsis of the book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (by James Shulman and William Bowen) in order to explain it.

 

Let's see if, this time, I can type a response that doesn't get swallowed by the monster eating bigsoccer today.

With regard to athletes in my teaching days, while most were average, at least one of the best students I ever taught. You know who were even better? I had three young ex-military people (two Army, one Navy). They ranged in intelligence from smart to very smart, but more to the point, they worked harder than just about any other students I had.

Frat guys, on the other hand, they sucked. While not every frat guy was loud, obnoxious, and unfunny, nearly every loud, obnoxious, unfunny student I taught was a frat guy.

 

Pretty much my experience, too. The military folks knew how to get their work done. If there were $1 pitchers on Thursday night, and a paper due on Friday, they'd get the paper done before the party, or even miss the party all together (an ex-Navy guy said that was the most valuable thing he learned in the service relating to his subsequent college career: "there will always be another party.")

 

Nah, what you do is finish the paper buzzed. Some of my best papers were written that way.

 

now thats just impossible to believe~

 

the original question in this thread was from a highschool an not a college, or wasn't it?

 

Community college.