From an A to a C

I was a business school undergrad and had taken an intro to operations research. The IE department offered an intro to operations research and because of campus politics neither department could claim the courses where the same (official university poilicy would have been to eliminate one of the courses if the departments claimed the course was the same).

So I took the IE course. I'm made an A in the business school course, they had the saqme math prerequisites, no problem (I thought).

He gave a 10 point extra credit question every exam. Going into the final my average was 108. (only engineers and jocks think a performance above 100% is possibile) The final was oinly going to cover inventory theory, which was a single chapter in the book. My car broke down two weeks before school was out, but no problem, I studied that chapter at home, knew the material in my sleep.

The book used greek letters in it's notation in that chapter.

It seems that our teacher decided not to use that chapter, and gave his lectures from notes which used a lot of S's, Z's, X's, etc as notation.

I had no idea what the questions where. I couldn't read the exam. I just sat there and stared at the wall for about 20 minutes. I got up and walked to the front fo the class and asked the teacher the ultimate in stupid questions "If I can't answer any of these questions but just write down stuff I know about inventory models will I* get some kind of partial credit".

He looked at me like I was from Mars (which taking an IE course while a business school student, I kind of was). "No".

"Okay" I went to my seat and stared at the wall some more.

He got curious and came to my desk and asked me what the problem was.

I just said, "I can't answer any of these things", wadded the exam up and threw it at him as I walked out.

I got a C.

Don't take that course

The first course I taught was a sophomore level stat methods course for
business school undergrads.

Our department also taught a graduate course in Stat Methods for Social
Welfare Students as a service course for MSW students.

MSW students who had a stat course as an undergrad were exempted from the
graduate state methods course. It was taught by our department head.

A graduating senior wanted to take my course. She was going to enter the
MSW program in the fall. She needed my permission and my department heads
permission to take my course because she didn't have the freshman math
prerequisites. My department head told her, "Don't take his course, wait
until the fall and take my course". She expfressed concern that she might
make a C and couldn't make a C as a graduate student. "Don't worry about
that. Just wait and take the course that's designed for someone with your
background and interests". She insisted. We gave her permission.

She made an F. A clearcut F. I consulted with my department head about
what to do (It was the first time I'd ever taught a course). He said, "To
hell with her, I told her and she didn't want to listen."

She didn't just need that course to get the graduate course waived. She
needed it (as an elective) to graduate.

Ba Humbug

When I was a first year grad student at LSU the fledging computer science
department offered an upper level undergrad control theory course for the
first time. I was in quantitative business analysis and enrolled. There
were nine students in the class -- three CS undergrads, 2 grad students
from QBA, 2 grad students from math, and 2 grad students from EE.

When he posted grades I saw 3 A's and 6 B's, I was one of the B's. I had
been a paper grader for the teacher when I'd been an undergrad and I knew
him pretty well. I asked him what the deal was with my grade (I pretty
much made 100 on every assignment).

"Those 3 kids worked their butts off and not a one of the grad students
did a lick of work.", was his explianation.

Merry Christmas

I took an undergraduate math course from an old Polish guy who'd been
teaching in Moscow for 25 years or so and had just moved to the US. He
started at LSU in the summer term and he taught the course without tests.
Just homework assignments and then he'd call us to the board -- he would
grade us on our blackboard performance. If we screwed up at the board
he'd call on us again next day to see if we'd figured it out yet. It was
a small class, only about 15 students and Altman (the teacher) couldn't
speak English very well.

The last day of class he comes in and tells us the dean has told him that
he must give a final exam in an undergraduate class so there would be a
final on the scheduled day. A lot of moans from the students.

I took the final and turned it in and when I gave it to him I asked if
he'd be posting grades.

"You got a B", he said.

I said, "How do you know, you haven't graded the final yet".

He said, "The dean told me I'm required to give a final. He did not tell
me I'm required to grade them.".

Grades

My first semester in college I had an option to opt out of college algegra
but I went ahead and took it anyway -- I'd been out of high school a
couple of years and thought I could use the review plus thought it would
be an easy grade.

Pretty early in the course I figured out I didn't need to go to class,
just show up for the exams. So I did that. I wasn't making an A, a B or
C, but that was fine with me.

The final was all stuff from the last two weeks of class that I'd never
seen in my life. We hadn't covered it in high school. I made a zero on
the final.

F

The next semester I went to class, did my homework. Made an A.

The A did not replace the F in the transcript. Forty years later that F
is still on my LSU transcript. It never caused me to not get a job and
never caused a problem with admission to graduate school. It just made no
difference at all to my life. And although I have met women who wouldn't
sleep with me, it was never because of a grade I made in college algebra
in fall 1969.

I did learn something about figuring out what's actually important though.

C student

When I was in grade school whenever my father yelled at me about my grades
I'd show him where they defined C as average and pointed out that one B
and 6 C's was an above average performance.

Then he'd through a beer bottle at me and I'd duck and go hide in the
woods for a couple of hours.

In a 10th grade science class we had a 100 question multiple choice final.
I figured out that I needed a 46 on the final to make a C in the class.
I answered 46 questions and turned it in (I was a smart ass kid in high
school).

The teacher knew my dad and called him to tell him to tell me I'd missed
one. I had not missed one but they thought telliing me I had would "teach
me a lesson". The lesson I learned was to not believe anything a school
employee ever tells you.

I ended up making surprisingly good grades in college for someone who
never much cared what grade I got.

Age discrimination

Inside Higher Ed has a story about age discrimination in faculty hiring at universities.

A lawyer at the AARP views academe as a sector of society with a serious age discrimination problem — and not just in employment. Dan Korhman, who works on employment discrimination cases, said he has received several inquiries from people who were either rejected from graduate programs or admitted but denied aid, and who were told that departments didn’t see the logic of their starting a graduate program at their age. “It’s blatant age discrimination,” he said, adding that he’s looking for a test case to bring.

A few years abo, when I was in my 40's I was thinking about going back to school to act5ually finish up a PhD. I talked to someone on the faculty of the University of Texas business school graduate program in Information, Risk, and Operations Management.

Basically they use the fact that age discrimination is rampant at major universities to rationalize their own illegal discrimination in graduate program admissions.

What he told me was that they p;ick students they think have a good chance to excel in research careers at top 20 schools and that someone my age is unlikely to get a job at such a school after graduation so it would be a waste of my time to apply to their program.

They're really just a bunch of slimeballs.

Academics, copyright, and the value of ideas

During a pretty good hunk of the 1970's I was a graduate student, first at LSU, then later at Northwestern. During the period at LSU my wife and I made frequent weekend trips from Baton Rouge to Lake Charles to visit her parents.

I didn't really like her parents much. Her father was a preacher and they were both real strong Jesus types, something I'd figured out was a complete crock of shit when I was about 12. I was polite to them, it would have been very embarrassing for them to not have their son-in-law attend Sunday morning services when he was in town, so I went and sat on the front pew for display. But during the rest of the weekend I'd just whole up in the den and bury my face in a stack of magazines, avoiding as much contact as I possibly could. That's when I learned a whole bunch of worthless trivia about being a freelance writer.

My mother-in-law wrote a lot of freelance religious poetry and essays and sold quite a bit of it to various religious and spiritual magazines. She'd been subscribing to Writer's Digest Magazine for over 10 years and had a huge collection of back issues. I read them all. Most of them more than once.

So, even thought the popular press wasn't covering it, when the copyright laws changed in 1976 I had some understanding of what was going one. One of the key changes that law made was a change in what it meant for a work to be "published". Prior to 1976 copyright was created only when a work was published and had an official copyright notice affixed. That meant a writer didn't really won his work in the sense of having actual enforceable property rights without the cooperation of a publisher. The 1976 law changed that. Copyright was established as soon as a work was "fixed in a tangible medium of expression". That pretty much meant that when you wrote it you owned it and there was actual property there to be owned. You didn't have to wait for a publisher to help you establish ownership.

At the time I was a student member of a handful of academic clubs, like ORSA and TIMS (now combined as INFORMS) and ASA and AIDS (now known as DSI). I started getting stuff in the mail from them explaining that the new copyright law was going to cause the sky to begin falling if all writers of research reports didn't immediately sign away all rights to the copyrights of their written works. Civilization could not survive if copyright didn't reside in the pockets of large organizations.

That was what they all said. And a world full of pea-brained acadmics nodded their heads sagely and said, "Yep, you must be right. Where do I sign? My work has no value anyway".

It's taken over 30 years but the world of academics seems to have finially gotten some backbone and demanded the right to do what they wish with their own property. Good for them.