Mankiw and TVHE last week posted on the infantile actions by students in Mankiw's Ec 10 class to not attend his lectures in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
This morning I picked up the final-exam scripts written by students in my ECON 203 micro class on Saturday morning. Teaching is fun, but grading is a pain, so I was rather hoping that my students had similarly decided to boycott my exam in protest against neoclassical hegemony or some such rubbish. Alas, the no-show rate was no different from usual. That is no surprise, however. Our students have already had the opportunity to indulge in a spontaneous social uprising. We got the student volunteer army; Harvard gets self-important twattery. I'm feeling quite smug at the moment!
That walk out was one step above 'liking' OWS in Facebook. I share you feelings about grading, particularly after receiving a pre-exam question on 'What is the value of e in the formula?'. I opted for ignoring the question and assuming that it was a prank; the alternative was too painful.
ReplyDelete@Luis
ReplyDeleteAt least that question was not one that could be answered with "it's in the course outline", which I considered making my sig file this year. (And the answers that were in the course outline were not idiosyncratic things unique to my outline, but generic information such as "What chapters from the text have we covered this year". Come to think of it, maybe my generic answer should become "You clearly haven't bothered attending lectures; since you are now guaranteed to fail, I suggest you don't waste your time attending the final exam."