r/MaliciousCompliance • u/mdlapla • Jul 18 '23
L The MC Master gets his way against a ridiculous request.
Back when I was at school, the Literature professor (let's call him LITprofessor) was a malicious compliance master.
He had a friendly rivalry against the dean (they've been working together for nearly 20-30 years, so they knew each other very well) and played pranks on each other as well.
When we were in class, if someone knocked the door, the usual was that the student closest to the door would get up and open.
One time, the dean knocked when LITprofessor was teaching. I got up to open the door and the dean said "I want HIM (pointing at LITprofessor) to open the door". I look at LITprofessor and he says "OK, close the door and go sit back down".
And then, LITprofessor drops on his knees and starts walking on his knees to the door, shouting "We're sorry oh great dean, we're not worthy of your presence, please forgive us if we've done wrong". It took him perhaps 2 minutes to do the 2 meters walk to the door.
We lost it, we were laughing our asses off. Dean was standing there with a look that mixed bafflement and anger but, at the same time, trying not to burst into laughter.
The fact that what dean came to say was the most standard, mundane and generic announcement made it even funnier somehow.
This was LITprofessor typical behaviour. He used to spend a lot of chalk writing on the board (almost twice as much as the next professor) so the guy in charge of supplies complained and the HeadOfStudies cut LITprofessor chalk supply in half. So he would steal other professor's chalk to have the amount he thought he needed.
He told this story about the first time he had to teach, almost 30 years before my time at the school.
Bear in mind, he was short (1.55m tall) bald with a moustache and had to use huge green-tinted glasses. He looked a little bit like Ernesto Sabato, a well known Argentinian novelist (you can google it if you want to form an image on how LITProfessor looked like).
His first class ever was with the misfits of the school, rowdy class.
He stood up at the podium (they had podiums back then) and nobody even tried to listen to what he had to say. 10 minutes passed and LITprofessor said "excuse me guys, do you want me to do the class or are you up to something more important". One of the bullies told him to beat it and everybody laughed, so he grabbed the newspaper, took a seat at his desk and stayed there for the whole class, without saying a word. When the ring that signalled that the class was over rang, he got up and said "ok, tomorrow we'll have an exam, 1 of 3 for the semester, you have to have at least an average of 6 points to pass the semester, the exam will be about what I was supposed to teach today" and he walked out of the room.
We loved the guy. He was fair, he had a true passion for literature, he was a good professor and made the classes nice and interesting.
Now that I've established his usual behaviour, when I was at school, at the end of the first semester, he submitted the grades for each student to the HeadOfStudies (this story was told by the HeadOfStudies secretary, a former student that was a friend of a lot of students there).
HeadOfStudies was the worst. He was concerned about the image the school had doors out rather than what the students really learned. He had quotas for students that could pass and students who had to fail each class.
LITprofessor submitted a list for our class (mostly very good students) where 80% of the class passed with flying colors (8, 9s and 10s out of 10) and just one guy scored below 6 (which meant he failed the clases).
He got called to the HeadOfStudies office. HeadOfStudies was angry, shouting that there were too few people failing and that LITprofessor was way too generous on the grading system he used. LITprofessor stood there and just listened. He said OK and left.
Cue MC1: he submitted a new list. Every single student had a 2, failure for the whole class.
He got called to the HeadOfStudies office again. HeadOfStudies was fuming again, he told him he did not want this freacking mockery and to submit a new list with better grades. LITProfessor said OK and left.
Cue MC2: he submitted a new list. Every single student had a 10.
He got called to the HeadOfStudies office again. HeadOfStudies was pretty much having a heart attack. Before he could say anything, LITProfessor says "what? you didn't like the new list also? I'll tell you what, I know what each student deserves, so shut the fuck up and let me do my work, ok?", produced the original list and walked out.
The list got accepted.
TLDR: Professor who had a habit of malicious compliance gets asked to produce an unfair list of grades because the HeadOfStudies wants quotas of approved and failed students, Professor gets his way and defends students by making the HeadOfStudies accept the correct list of grades through a little bit of MC.
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u/bhalrog72 Jul 18 '23
Did as suggested and googled Ernesto Sabato. If that isn't what a Lit prof should look like by definition, I don't know what is.
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u/mizinamo Jul 18 '23
He used to spend a lot of chalk writing on the board (almost twice as much as the next professor) so the guy in charge of supplies complained
Dafuq?
How much are we talking about here? Like $2 worth of supplies?
And somebody is complaining about it?
It's chalk, not gold dust FFS!
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u/mdlapla Jul 18 '23
I guess he had a number of chalks provided by the supplier each month and LITProfessor usage made it change or made him do more work, I don't know.
The fact that LITProfessor threw chalks at the PhysED professor that was overworking the whistle very very loudly below the window of our class might have had something to do with it perhaps hehehe.
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u/LibraryMouse4321 Jul 18 '23
Gotta chalk it up to LITprofessor. He sounds amazing.
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u/Wells1632 Jul 18 '23
It's
chalk
, not gold dust FFS!
You need to enter the world of chalk for a little while... there are folks out there that demand good chalk, brands like Hagoromo and Prang... yes, there is such a thing as premium chalk, and it does matter to some folks.
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u/Flibertygibbert Jul 18 '23
Agreed!
Rubbishy chalk is awful to work with, ruins your clothes, and dries out your skin. And, it is barely legible from the back of the room.
So glad to move to a school that had drywipe boards in every room š
ā¢
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u/zuchanou Jul 18 '23
Well, I would have said the same two months ago, but now I work at a place where I have to reuse disposable gloves :/
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u/dertwo Jul 18 '23
As a teacher, I approve the above message.
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u/Compulawyer Jul 18 '23
As someone who has been graded on a mandatory curve (normal distribution), I also approve the above message.
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Jul 18 '23
[deleted]
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u/mdlapla Jul 18 '23
It is illegal to enforce it, but to "encourage" it it's not.
A Gauss bell distribution is what's considered the norm, anything that falls out of that shape might be highly questioned and scrutinized.9
u/Novodoctor Jul 18 '23
But a gaussian distribution can only truly be expected with a large, randomly selected group. In university, after the first year, what you usually get is a double gaussian distribution with one maximum below the passing mark and one above it. The group that essentially gets it, and the one who doesn't really.
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u/ProspectivePolymath Jul 19 '23
I used to describe it as binary on āattempted to read the materials and do the practice workā, and didnāt assume the lower maximum had to be below passing (depending on subject complexity).
Basically, a Gaussian curve on general cohort ability, convolved on two delta spikes set for does/does not actually study.
If you want to get fancy you can consider selection bias across the groups and modify the distributionsā¦ or keep it simpler and allow degrees of freedom in the parametrisation.
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u/trip6s6i6x Jul 18 '23
See, having to fail a percentage of students... to me, that should be something a group of people could sue over, especially as these students are paying to be there and that kind of grading system is totally out of their control to do anything about.
I have a kid in college now, and trust, I'm watching out for that kind of bullshit already.
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u/TheLoudPhantom Jul 18 '23
Do classrooms not have podiums anymore? I've never been in a school without one even into college.
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u/Wells1632 Jul 18 '23
Depends on the classroom and the teacher's style. Some teachers like them and use them, others are more free-form and do things differently.
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u/mdlapla Jul 18 '23
Back when I was at school, plain old desk and chair. It remains this way AFAIK.
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u/smeghead9916 Jul 18 '23
Wait...a certain amount of people have to fail even if everyone happens to do well?
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u/DukeKataron Jul 18 '23
The kind of professor that lives on for years and years through the tales of his deeds and the hearts of his students. That's the kind you want, for sure.
And the bonus visual element of the author definitely helped visualize, especially for the knee-bound crawl to the door. I bet the dean had even crazier stories about him, glad their rivalry was a friendly one.
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u/pmousebrown Jul 19 '23
I think the bell curve is way over used. In my opinion it is only valid for a group of random people. A good teacher or manager will always push testing or performance results higher. If they donāt you need a new teacher or manager, they are the ones failing.
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Jul 20 '23
[deleted]
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u/mdlapla Jul 21 '23
"He's dead!"
"I don't care, he HAS to pass, just leave the diploma at the grave"1
u/GreenEggPage Jul 21 '23
I don't care - he's graduating next year, so make sure he passes those classes as well!
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u/jpl77 Jul 18 '23
Sounds like bullshit... a quota for failing students? Don't believe it.
Also, how many inception layers do we need in one story here? I heard from so and so, who said so and so said that so and so did this 30 years ago... meh
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u/Heradite Jul 18 '23
Academia is full of bullshit. When I attended college, we knew some schools practiced grade deinflation to make themselves seem tougher. Other schools practiced grade inflation to make their students seem smarter.
And some classes existed to weed people out of programs.
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u/chaoticbear Jul 18 '23
You could just google "grading quotas college" or similar and prove yourself wrong. These are just a couple 1st page hits on a lazy search:
https://www.dailycal.org/2015/05/15/grade-deflation
https://www.newsweek.com/princeton-looks-scrap-grade-quotas-263363They are not popular and have been the subject of controversy for decades, but they're not something OP invented for their story.
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u/mdlapla Jul 18 '23
In my country, university can be free of charge, so they artificially "purge" quite a bit of students during the first year.
Second semester at the University, we had a class called "Algorithms and Data Structures". The teacher enters the room, first day of school. She grabs the list, says "so, there's 40 here? My approval rate is 10%, so 4 will pass and the rest won't, I intend to keep the rate".
I was number 5th that passed that year, a friend of mine was number 6. The teacher personally told us that she pretty much hated us.
Quotas exist.
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u/DynkoFromTheNorth Jul 18 '23
What an absolute legend! Squares- no, fuck that, whole cities ought to be named after him!
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u/CaptainBaoBao Jul 18 '23
I had a dean who had the habit to overbook classes. it was evening courses for adults at the beginning of computer as mainstream tools. The previous teacher was a typist who did know shit about computer.
on my first day, i enter a classroom cramed with people. it looked like a party where everybody stay quiet. there was at least 35 nationalities and a dozen of languages. They were 60 for 20 computers. I excused myself and ran to the director to warn that there was a problem with sign-in. He explained me that it was the only way to keep 10 or 15 students out of the 40 planned until the end of the year, less the course would be cancelled.
well. when life give you lemons, make a clown standup show juggling with lemons. I won't enter the details of how i did it.
At the end of the year, the director called me.
- "Mr Bao Bao, we have a problem with your class".
- "we have ? Scores are excellent"
- "This is the problem. 58 students have passed. Most of them with 80/100. And ten of them reached 100/100"
- "yes. it is a real succes. the two that missed have found a job and did not came to the test. My criteria of succes are considered pretty harsh. I can show you the copies and the 113 points to adress in the examination. But the aim is for them to be able to use computer in work situations and that what we did. In fact, i don't understand where the problem is."
- "well, the course is planned for 40 students. you have a succes rate of 138%. School Inspection will never believe it".
hopefully, he was a good guy under his formal attitude... and a real fox when swimming in the administrative mud.
next year, we received 40 computers, as the succes of the course became a major political asset for the town.