Are students aware that most of their professors can accurately predict their final grades prior to the final exam or paper? Is this just hubris on my part, or do people in the biz long enough get very good at this?
If it's not hubris, then it raises a genuine practical ethics problem. If I already know what the student is going to make, why do I feel morally obligated to grade the paper? I can't figure this out.
I'm clearly obligated by prudence to grade the papers as the LSU hair and teeth men* would be very unhappy with me for not doing so. But would they be right to be unhappy?
Maybe the problem is that if the students knew I wasn't grading their final papers, then they wouldn't do the work. So perhaps not doing the grading would involve deception? This seems pretty weak to me though. I could just not say anything one way or the other, or honestly say that I might** grade the person's exam or paper. Knowing their exams might be graded would motivate them enough.
A few students want comments on their work and we owe them that, but the overwhelming majority of them don't. So why not just hold onto the papers and grade them later if a student wants comments?
I'm not sure that these kinds of concerns could convince me to actually enjoy grading though, which makes the thing pretty disanalogous to other forms of bearing witness. I mean if you find it uniformly unpleasant to talk to sick people, then you are not going to be the right kind of listener. So maybe there really is no good reason to grade final exams.
[Notes:
*What people who do the actual work in the tech industry call the suits. In addition to having wonderful hair and teeth, they are usually tall as well.**** The world doesn't make very much sense.
**Not in the Eddie Haskell-like philosophical sense where there's just a possible world out there where me or a convincing copy do grade them, but rather as a statement about how the actual world could turn out. I don't think it's correct to label this kind of possibility "epistemic" possibility. To say that something might happen is not to say that for all we know it will happen. I'm out of date on the literature on this point, so maybe none of this is controversial. I know there's some new work on modal realism without possible worlds that goes beyond the actualism/Lewisian divide chronicled in Divers' Possible Worlds, as well as new two-dimensional work on how to have an actuality operator in the language. That stuff is probably relevant. . .
***Several people (I think all non-philosophers) have told me it has a happy ending when I tell them I want to see it but always find the prospect too depressing. I don't get this. How could it possibly have a happy ending? Did Spielberg cast Robert Benigni? For an entertaining critique by someone who really hates the film for these and related reasons, go here.
****Some hair and teeth men, like Steve Ballmer, don't actually have hair.]
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