Q: I teach at a state university. Sometimes at the end of a semester a student asks me to raise a grade. Typically it is a student with children, who receives financial aid, health insurance and housing and risks losing these benefits if she receives the F she earned rather than the D that I could bestow — harsh consequences. Should I raise the grade? — V.H., Montana
A: You should not. I admire your sensitivity to the fact that a grade can have repercussions more severe than a professor intends or most of us find humane. But you are considering the wrong solution to this problem.
You must grade consistently; you may not establish a Free Pass for Poor Students. If you do so, why not announce it at the start of the term, saving these students the inconvenience of attending class and sparing their classmates the demoralizing spectacle later of someone handed a grade she does not merit?
Instead, you should intervene early in the term. It must be apparent long before the end of the semester that a student is foundering. You might give her a chance to make up poor work or find remedial tutoring. If burdens outside of class overwhelm a student, grant her an incomplete or provide extra time for an assignment.
There is something faintly disingenuous about these grade-change pleas. A single F is unlikely to be catastrophic; the student could be failing other courses too. Have you been importuned because you are a soft touch?
That said, neither you nor the student should have to face such a dilemma. It is a cold society indeed that makes a mother’s housing and health care contingent on her grades.
Q: Some local hotels contract with limo companies, charging a company a fee for the exclusive right to park its limos at the hotel to provide transportation for guests. I drive for an independent company. We tip the bell staff to call us if the contract company has no car handy, so we can swoop in and pick up the guest. We shorten the guests’ wait, and after all, it’s the contract company’s responsibility to have a car available. Right? — R.B., Scottsdale, Ariz.
A: Wrong. What you call a “tip,” more fastidious people like Noah Webster, me and the Arizona attorney general might call a “bribe.” You’ve greased the bell staff to cheat their boss, exploit the guests and stiff the contracted limo company.
Not only has the bell staff invited — or at least accepted — bribes from you; they have also set up a little entrepreneurial operation within the hotel, selling what isn’t theirs to sell, a limo referral, thus poaching on a prerogative of the hotel owner.
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