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. . . . . 1. The kid. When I was a freshman at Brown, there were still classes on Saturday morning. On one of the first weekends of the semester, I decided to meet with high school friends at Yale for the Brown-Yale football game. Needless to say, I would be skipping a class, namely my Expository Prose course. We had been given on Thursday a writing assignment, together with a handout---call it "H"---on what constituted good writing. After returning, I went about writing my paper and after rounds of editing I was satisfied with it. Then, it occurred to me that I should read H. Upon doing so, I found that what I had written was not in accordance with H; indeed, I found that I had trouble making sense of H (it seemed to be largely double-talk). I desperately tried to rewrite the article, and it came out pretty mediocre. I submitted it, and when my instructor returned it graded, he said. "It looks like you dashed this off a hour before class." In denying that, I explained what had really happened. His reaction: "In class on Saturday, I told the students to ignore H. If you miss a class, it's your obligation to find out what went on in class." He also said I might have requested an extension (a what?) ....
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. . . . . 2. The five little bares. After the second lecture on a Tuesday early in the semester, I returned to my office with the homework papers I had collected. The door was closed. A couple of minutes later, I heard a knock on the door. When I opened the door, I saw five eager students who wanted to hand in their assignment. My first inference, likely correct, was that they had skipped class, and got to the lecture room a little too late. It is my standard practice to accept homework until the papers are given out to the TA's for grading, so there was no big problem with that.
The big issue lay with how they had written up the homework. The syllabus (on-line) was announced on Day One to be the source of all information about the topics, homework, exams, and grading of the course. It contained the description that only a small number of homework problems were to be submitted; these (WI: writing-intensive) were to be written up carefully, with no omitted steps. I looked at three of the papers as they came in, and they all contained one-line answers to a certain problem. Had they even looked at the syllabus? I thought. I told them that if I were grading the papers, I would give them a zero---the correct grade according to the announced policy. I asked, "Have you looked at the syllabus?" Silence. "Well, I recommend that you do that!" They were so completely exposed.