Change the Constitution, Change Your Grade

May 6, 2017 7:50 AM

The Bad Grade that Changed the Constitution - NPR ATC (text) FTA: "Twenty-five years ago, the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified — nearly two centuries after it was written. The improbable story of how that happened starts with the Founding Fathers themselves and winds up at the University of Texas. And it's a heartening reminder of the power of individuals to make real change."
posted by randomkeystrike (19 comments total)

That teacher is everything I hate about institutionalized education. "My negligent and careless grading resulted in something good! All of those years of antagonizing and disappointing my students has been redeemed!"
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 8:02 AM on May 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

Negligent? Careless? Don't you think it's just as likely that the paper itself was merely average and he got the grade he deserved? College writing is about a lot more than drawing someone's attention to an interesting thing you found in a book. Did he have a strong thesis statement? Were his arguments cogent and well-organized? Did he anticipate and address possible objections?

Grade inflation wasn't as bad in 1982. If he wrote an average paper, he should have gotten an average grade. That his topic would become an exciting development in constitutional law has no bearing on that.

The real story here is that his dissatisfaction with his own performance drove him to accomplish something big. Would he have had as much fire if he'd gotten an A? Sounds to me like an honest appraisal of his work drove him to improve--aka, the system working as intended.
posted by Krawczak at 8:30 AM on May 6, 2017 [18 favorites]

Next time students ask "is there anything I can do to change my grade," there's a canned sarcastic response just waiting to be used. (Let's reserve it for the really obnoxious ones.)
posted by eotvos at 8:41 AM on May 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

We'll never know until we have a consortium of educators agree on the quality of the paper, but for me, the teacher's explanation of the low grade says it all: "I kind of glanced at it."

There's no indication that the student was dissatisfied with his performance. He was frustrated by the teacher's unfairness grading his paper - not all criticisms of grading are hubris - and sought to prove that the teacher's grade was unfair with a flamboyant and undeniable gesture. What makes it galling is that the teacher took his later results as justification of her carelessness!

When someone does good by rebelling against a problematic system (or, in this case, a capricious authoritarian), one should celebrate the rebel for making the system change, not celebrate the system for creating the need to rebel.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 8:52 AM on May 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

I was actually working on an FPP about this, and I did not know about the post facto change to Watson's grade. Indeed, I had read that when the retired prof had been previously approached she shrugged and said that essentially she could scarcely remember a paper written by a random undergrad decades ago and no, she saw no reason to change it.

The NPR story also omits that Madison pitched 12 amendments, ten of which made it in as the Bill of Rights and one more subsequently as the 27th Anendment. His orphan twelfth set the number of representatives at one per 50,000 citizens, which if ratified would presently oblige the House to consist of over six thousand members. Yippee!
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:02 AM on May 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

the C was probably fine
Look, i understand maybe doing this when you've got like 150 papers to grade and you know the student's work and you're just getting through things. But when a student comes back to you and says "Can you please reconsider, I think I deserve more than a C" then you take the damn time to read the fucking paper. Do your job. Stop being willy-nilly. Jeez. Sorry, but she should be taking no credit for this.

Anyway, that dude seems pretty cool, and I like the amendment, so I'm glad he did what he did.
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:07 AM on May 6, 2017 [6 favorites]

I'm cool with a 6000+ member house, though 538 will have to change their name.
posted by fings at 9:46 AM on May 6, 2017

I wrote a poli-sci paper in university back in 1988 that argued the Soviet Union was headed for collapse that would bring down the Warsaw Pact by 1992. My professor hated it (his family had been driven out of eastern Europe by the Soviets and he overestimated their strength) and marked it low. Did I deserve a better grade because I was right in my read of the underlying situation? No, it was a crap paper. Just because I got the right answer doesn't mean I presented it in a convincing fashion, with proper referencing and enough justification.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 9:55 AM on May 6, 2017 [6 favorites]

I'm cool with a 6000+ member house, though 538 will have to change their name.

sixthousandtwohundredninety.com, though they'd have to register a new domain name every 10 years.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 9:59 AM on May 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

If the 27th Amendment could be enacted after being put on the shelf since 1789, shouldn't the ERA also be given a second chance at ratification? I know Congress put a time limit on its ratification, but isn't there a Constitutional argument to be made that, once proposed, a Constitutional amendment can be reintroduced at any time? After all, I'm old enough to remember that people argued the reasons we couldn't have ERA is that it would lead to gay marriage and women in combat. Now that horse is out of the barn, there's no basis for that old Phyllis Schlafly argument for not ratifying ERA.
posted by jonp72 at 10:03 AM on May 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

"I kind of glanced at it."

Undeniably, this was not the most media-astutute substitution for the actual answer: "Are you fucking kidding me? An unexceptional class paper from decades ago? I barely remember the papers I graded last week. Get some perspective and don't call me again."

It could be the student is right, wrote a brilliant paper, and was terribly mistreated by his grader who wasn't doing her job. It could be it was an idea with uncanny political traction described by an entirely mediocre paper that deserved a C. It's hard to say without seeing the paper. (Which would have been really fun, and is a lost opportunity.) Claiming that any wacky idea that becomes politically significant after decades of patient scut-work must have been spawned by a great paper is quite an assumption.
posted by eotvos at 10:32 AM on May 6, 2017 [7 favorites]

the teacher's explanation of the low grade says it all: "I kind of glanced at it."

This kind of seems like a difference of interpretation between someone who has graded papers and someone who hasn't. First of all, the professor re-reviewed the paper in the first place, which they did not have to do and probably did not have time for. This is not something negligent or capricious professors do. Secondly, confirming the grade of a C paper does not require poring over. C is average. Does this paper stand out? No? OK, C.

But ultimately, without the paper to evaluate, I ask myself, "As a speech act, do I want to publicly agree with a policy wonk who is framing his success as a smug revenge on a woman who supposedly wronged him decades ago and continue to beat the war drum of blaming the US's education problems on the educators themselves? Or just figure maaaaybe this professional knows how to do their job and this was yet another of the thousands of students with a good idea, an OK paper, and a sense of entitlement visible from space?"

On preview, yeah, eotvos.
posted by Krawczak at 10:35 AM on May 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

neat story! i mean, this kind of letter writing campaign probably wouldnt have worked if the amendment was more consequential (i think the ways members of congress are getting rich aint really based on their formal salaries...), but what the hell, why not.

as for the bad grade thing, here's my dumb anecdote: in 2009, thinking i was done being a lawyer, i applied to ph.d. programs in political theory. i premised all my statements of interest/anticipated research on the hypothesis that political propaganda was about to have a massive resurgence. no bites from the schools i wanted. so i hate to say i told you so, but.....
posted by wibari at 10:50 AM on May 6, 2017

I had the same "you don't get credit for inspiring someone because you couldn't be arsed to grade their paper properly" reaction that others did. It's not clear, of course, that the original paper actually was better than a C paper -- but the "I glanced at it" bit does not speak to conscientious grading either way.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:14 AM on May 6, 2017

Also weird that the professor is getting/taking credit for the grade when it is clearly the teaching assistant who gave it out.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:15 AM on May 6, 2017

I'm cool with a 6000+ member house, though 538 will have to change their name.

Per Wikipedia:

As Congress did not set a time limit for its ratification, the Congressional Apportionment Amendment is still technically pending before the states. Ratification by an additional 27 states is necessary for this amendment to be adopted.

Here's your chance to be the next Gregory Watson, make constitutional history, and get an FPP about your achievement in a few decades. Only 27 states to go!
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:25 PM on May 6, 2017

The apportionment amendment:

After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

So, really, it's one Congressman per at least every 50,000 people, so it wouldn't mandate increasing the size of the House.

In terms of Congress having the ability to limit time for ratification, this was established as OK in Dillon v. Gloss, where a guy tried to claim that the Prohibition amendment (which was the first to have a time limit for ratification) wasn't ratified properly. He lost. ("Of the power of Congress, keeping within reasonable limits, to fix a definite period for the ratification we entertain no doubt.")

There was a case (NOW v. Idaho) about whether the states that repealed their ERA ratifications could do so, and also over whether Congress extending the deadline was legal, but the Supremes decided that since not enough states ratified it by the new deadline anyway, the question was moot, so they didn't need to answer the details.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 1:46 PM on May 6, 2017

Nobody's mentioned the origins of FedEx yet?

In 1965, while he was earning a Bachelor’s degree in economics at Yale University, Frederick Smith penned a term paper for Professor Challis A. Hall’s Economics 43A class which contained an outline for a delivery service that would use a “hub and spokes” concept to handle the routing of parcels. (This plan entails first directing packages through a central sorting facility before dispatching them onwards to their
intended destinations.) Such plan did eventually form the backbone of Federal Express, a company Smith started in 1971 upon his return from Vietnam, where he served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1966 to 1970.

A number of sources assert the term paper earned a C from the instructor who marked it. However, while that aspect of the tale has been widely touted as fact, it does not appear to be verifiable. Smith himself fed the acceptance of this element of the story by once stating in an offhand comment about the term paper “I guess I got my usual gentlemanly C,” but in a 2002 interview Smith acknowledged “I don’t really remember what grade I got. I probably didn’t get a very good one, though, because it wasn’t a well-thought-out paper.”

more details here
posted by phoenixy at 3:49 PM on May 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

Taking credit for creating the situation in which heroic acts are required, like that villain from Unbreakable. If she would only grade all students unfairly, she would be akin to a god.
posted by vanar sena at 10:21 PM on May 6, 2017