Report From First COGS Meeting October 9, 2007

Hi everyone,

 Sorry this took so long to get up online.  Here’s what happened at the first COGS meeting, September 26.

1. We welcomed a new faculty member, Alisa Lincoln, to the committee.

2. I reported graduate student concerns.  The only concern I received was related to the yearly problem of grad student dental insurance.  As you may have noticed, we don’t have any.  It was recommended that we approach GPSA about this problem, as we have been successful this past year in getting improvements in our health insurance plan.  I have since been told that this will be brought up by a grad student before the GPSA finance board.

3. Matt Hunt updated us on the goings-on of the CAS Graduate Coordinators.  Graduate department open houses and recruitment for the School of Social Science, Urban Affairs, and Public Policy will take place beginning in February.  Some programs want to increase admission (presumably, to more master’s students) to bring in more money that might be redistribuited as dissertation fellowships.  This would probably take place next year or beyond.
     A New World Languages Center has been proposed for grad student language instruction, since there is no language requirement anymore to get a Ph.D.  Lessons could be worked out on a flexible schedule to accommodate students.  If anyone is excited about this idea, contact one of your COGS reps and let us know what language you might be interested in learning, and how much time you would be able to commit.
    The grad application system has been overhauled, so that all pieces of applications can be submitted online, and reviewed by more than one faculty member at a time.  This should ease the admissions process for COGS faculty members this spring.

4.  Matt Hunt also gave an update from a recent CAS meeting that proposed creating “University Graduate Groups” (UGGs).  These would be interdepartmental alliances where faculty would be listed in several departments at a time — it seems that this is just a scheme to make it look like we have more faculty members than we already do and boost NU’s ranking in U.S. News and other such publications.  Instituting UGGs would also probably involve differentiating between graduate and undergraduate faculty (only grad faculty would participate in UGGs).  This would create a more rigid hierarchy of faculty members within departments.  The UGGs proposal got a rather cool reception from COGS, for the reasons listed above, and because we already have at NU “Interdisciplinary Graduate Groups” (IGGs), and no one really knows what the difference would be between IGGs and UGGs.  Ugh. 

 That’s all.  Please e-mail us with any comments, complaints, or suggestions.

CMB

Careful, TAs! October 5, 2007

You never know what kind of shit your students will pull.

     CMB

Student takes his C to federal court

Judge dismisses suit against UMass

In his lawsuit, Brian Marquis contended the university violated his civil rights and contractual rights. (STEPHEN ROSE FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff  |  October 4, 2007

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff  |  October 4, 2007

Plenty of college students grumble when they get a mediocre grade and feel that they deserved better. When Brian Marquis got a C instead of an A-minus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he made a federal case of it.

Literally.

Marquis, a 51-year-old paralegal seeking bachelor’s degrees in legal studies and sociology, filed a 15-count lawsuit in US District Court in Springfield in January after a teaching assistant graded a political philosophy class on a curve and turned Marquis’s A-minus into a C. Marquis contends that the university violated his civil rights and contractual rights and intentionally inflicted “emotional distress.”

Last week, after a brief hearing with Marquis and a university lawyer, District Court Judge Michael A. Ponsor dismissed the suit. But Marquis said this week he is considering appealing to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

“This is not something I relish,” he said from the W.E.B. Du Bois Library on campus. “This is not an issue of me walking into court and saying, ‘I don’t like the way this professor grades this paper,’ which is purely their academic prerogative. This is an issue where the empirical data was quite clear and convincing to any reasonable mind that my performance was well within a higher range.”

Phillip Bricker, chairman of the philosophy department and one of eight defendants in the suit, said it had already caused enough damage. “I think suing over a grade is somewhat absurd,” he said. “It ended up just wasting a lot of people’s time and money.”

In an era when the courts are asked to decide who owns a record-setting home run ball and who is to blame when a cup of hot coffee from a fast-food restaurant scalds a person, it seems perhaps only modestly surprising that a grade dispute leads to litigation.

But Catharine Porter, the UMass-Amherst ombudsman and a defendant in the suit, said that Marquis’s complaint was the only one she was aware of over a disputed grade in 30 years at the university. He got the C in a class called “Problems in Social Thought,” which explored the works of theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Karl Marx.

“If every student that didn’t like his or her grade started to do this, we’d have to hire, I don’t know, 25,000 attorneys,” Porter said.

Ada Meloy - general counsel for the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 college and university presidents - said such suits are rare and almost never successful. Generally, the complaints reflect an unrealistic fear that a single grade can torpedo academic or professional goals, she said.

Marquis - who salts his comments with “strike that” - acknowledged he was alarmed the C might lower his grade point average and make him less attractive to a law school.

The C has rendered his transcript a “dismal record of non-achievement,” his suit said. Marquis, who enrolled at UMass-Amherst in spring 2006, said he has roughly a B-plus average.

His chief adversary in the suit was Jeremy Cushing, a graduate student in philosophy and teaching assistant who is about half his age. He did not respond to interview requests.

At the start of the semester last fall, Marquis said, Cushing told the class that students would take three tests, each worth 25 percent of the final grade, for a total of 75 percent. Four papers, each worth 5 percent, would comprise 20 percent of the grade. Class participation would decide the rest.

Based on that formula, Marquis figured he scored a 92.5 percent, or an A-minus. But when the Lanesborough resident checked his grade online in early January, he saw a C and e-mailed Cushing to complain.

Cushing wrote back that he graded the students more stringently on the third exam because they had had a full semester to learn how to write for a philosophy class. As a result, Cushing wrote, Marquis got an 84 for the class. But the students’ numerical scores struck Cushing as too high, so he graded everyone on a curve before assigning letter grades. Marquis ended up with a C.

“As I am entering grades, I consider whether or not they seem fair,” he wrote Marquis. “. . . I thought your grade was a good reflection of your work.”

Marquis e-mailed Porter, the ombudsman. But she said faculty have their own grading scales and that one professor might view an 84 as an A-minus, while another might view it as a C.

“I urge you to accept this grade and continue on with your course work, as there are no grounds for an academic grievance,” she wrote.

Less than three weeks later, Marquis filed suit.

Peter Michelson, a lawyer for the university, urged Judge Ponsor to dismiss it, saying Marquis had failed to present a single legitimate legal claim.

He also focused on public policy, asking, “Does the court really want to put itself in the business of reviewing, under some constitutional or federal statutory doctrine, the propriety of the grades which a student has received?”

Ponsor gave his answer last Wednesday from the bench: No.