The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a story from The Boston Globe about a student who, dissatisfied with receiving a C in a course after a curve was applied to the grades, sued the school. The judge dismissed the suit, and the student intends to appeal.
This is a little odd, but frankly not that shocking. More interesting are the comments on the story: a number of people seem to feel that since the student is paying tuition, he somehow deserves a good grade, regardless of the judgment of the instructor; others seem to believe that all grades should be assigned purely based on percentage of questions answered correctly on exams; still others contend that this is all due to the unconscionable practice of having TA's grade exams; a few even feel like it may have been correct for the judge to dismiss the suit.
I must say that this response surprises me a little. After all, it is the public (which must include those who have commented) that will suffer if the university awards a degree to a student who does not deserve it. As I see it, with regards to grading, the course instructors have a duty first to the public, then to the student, to grade accurately. That the public could be harmed by inaccurate grading is fairly clear: no one wants a student managing their finances who should not have passed their arithmetic courses. That the student should receive the grade he deserves is similarly clear, although the definition of 'deserves' might merit observation.
Many of the comments to the story indicated that the student 'deserved' an A because he had expected to receive one; had he expected a C, even having performed exactly as well in the class, there would have been no doubt that he deserved that grade. I agree that it seems unfair to give a student false expectations, but I feel that it would be a greater crime to grant an unearned A than an unexpected C.
I could say much more, but I will address only one further topic: many commenters seemed to feel that it would be acceptable to grade 'fuzzily' (i.e. partly at the discretion of the instructor) in courses in English or the humanities, where correctness might be a matter of degree, but that there was no such room for discretion in a course in mathematics, where 'obviously' an answer would be either right or wrong, with nothing in between.
To this I must respond that I have had only one math class with multiple-choice exams, but nearly every non-mathematical course I took had at least a segment of most exams multiple-choice. In my math courses, I expect my answers to be graded based not only on whether I eventually arrive at the desired result, but whether my method of solution implies sufficient knowledge of the subject. Of course I do not mean to say by this that math courses require discretion and other courses do not, but rather that all courses that deal with any subject in any but the most elementary of fashions will require some amount of care on the part of the instructor to assign grades appropriately; judging knowledge and especially understanding is rarely a matter of counting the number of correct answers.