If you ever plan to motor west

[austin_dern]

Three of the dead at the Nicoll highway collapse have been recovered. The search for the fourth, foreman Heng Yeow Peow -- who'd gone in to make sure all the employees were out -- has been called off. It's believed his body is at the deepest part of the collapse; but heavy rains make it more urgent that the soil (landfill, you'll recall) be stabilized before nearby buildings are threatened. There are ominous cracks in some buildings, and those are being investigated; the Land Transport Authority claims damage in a carpark is independent of the accident.

The main contractors for the dig, in a move either compassionate or cynical depending on your mood, have publicly apologized to the families, the workers, and Singapore at large. They're also offering -- no conditions, no signing of waivers, no impairment of future civil claims -- the families of the dead S$30,000 so their immediate money needs are relieved. I want to say that's a classy and compassionate move, but I'm suspicious of kind acts accompanied by press releases. That's my runaway cynicism, though.

And as if to slap Singapore out of its obsession with this (and its comparisons to the 1986 Hotel New World collapse, when Civil Defence was not as organized) there's fresh SARS in China and the horrible train crash in North Korea.

Now on to me, and grading. A tip, in case any students are reading -- when you have asked your instructor to re-consider and re-grade an essay, and your instructor has agreed and has returned it to you with a new grade, do not return to him an hour later to ask ``we were wondering about the essay, could we have more points?'' unless you have a specific answer in mind to his inevitable question, ``For what?'' A little chutzpah can improve your grade, but know when enough is enough. Though it's an inevitable question I was surprised I said it; the look on the students' faces suggested they hadn't thought about it either. Usually I'm less blunt.

And this is more customized to me, but: the essay was one-tenth of the course grade. Therefore, one point on the essay was worth one-tenth of one percent of the course grade. Even five points only brings you up to a mild chance of affecting the final letter grade. You have to give me a reason to think it's worth spending still more time on it. (I also think I'm an easy grader, mind, so I tend to be tough in regrading.)

Trivia: Emily, the partner with whom Charlie Brown learned to dance, was a figment of his imagination. Source: Peanuts daily strip of 17 February 1995, reprinted in It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, Snoopy, Charles M. Schulz.

Currently Reading: The Silver Eggheads, Fritz Leiber. If there's a slow day around here I may give it a review; it and The Wanderer have at least proto-furry elements of interest to those reading me. (I suppose it's my circle of friends; I can't help thinking of Livejournal as a furry gathering.)

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how hairsplitting people can get with their grade-grubbing. I'm in a crabby mood right now because I just had to deal with two more plagiarism cases. One claimed (despite several word-for-word passages in his paper that I found on the web) that he'd never seen those web sites before. The other claimed that the plagiarized passage was intended to be a quotation but he forgot the quotation marks. Right. Can't people ever just bow out gracefully when caught red-handed?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, a plagiarism case was one of the students who wanted more points! The essay on Euclid's elements I thought used too much stuff copied right off a web presentation. She argued that she doesn't have much choice in how to present (say) a proof two circles that intersect don't have the same center, there's a correct proof and nothing else. She's not correct in that -- there are many ways to present any proof, even if you're sticking just to Euclid's proof of it -- but I concede that it's reasonable to think you can't change a word of a proof, and graded on the parts of the essay gluing together proofs and postulates. And then she wanted more.

I was never one to nitpick my own grades -- a bad experience in fifth grade turned me off caring about grades for life -- but it was liberating as a teaching assistant when I realized one or two points on any assignment (or even every assignment) don't make that much difference. It cut out grading-time worries about ``is this worth six points off, or only five?''

But nitpicking ... one time at RPI a student tried to argue with me, for a half hour, that my taking points off because he didn't have the axes of every graph labelled -- an explicit requirement stated at the start of the course and at every assignment -- wasn't met. His argument was that it was clear from context; mine was I didn't ask if it was clear from context, I asked if it was on paper. It was my lunch hour, too.

The only thing more annoying was students protesting that I didn't have the right to take off three points of a Maple computer lab because they mistook its and it's. (One student even griped about this on Usenet three years after leaving my course!) Happily, all my professors agreed on grading for grammar, and for its/it's in particular.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Heh. I don't even grade for grammar on humanities papers. It's not the done thing here, and if I did it there would be mass revolt. Pathetic, I know.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'd agree not making grammar the only basis for grading a paper -- particularly in Singapore, where Singlish thrives despite government paranoia about it -- but I don't see how it can't be part of the grade.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I should clarify that one of the paper criteria in this class I'm currently assisting (and generally in any class) is "clarity and organization." If the grammar is so bad it's hard to understand what's going on, that counts against clarity and organization. But spelling usually isn't counted. (I would consider its-vs.-it's to be a spelling rather than a grammar issue -- I realize a case could be made for either.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I really just consider its-versus-it's to be annoying, which is why I grade that even if I forgive nearly everything else (just a pinprick, mind, something like one point out of 100). Back when I was editing a campus newspaper I spotted the mistake a few times from across the room. Terrified the people I charged past to blue-pen it.