More on Appleton

Some dude leaked an email from Carol Folt on the Dartmouth Review comments page.


It says: "The email concerned grading issues in Music 3 taught during the fall 2004 to 76 students (final enrollment). At the conclusion of the course, the Dean's Office received 42 student complaints -- an unprecedented number – from students who received grades from A- to D. As is standard procedure, the Associate Dean for the responsible division (in this case for Humanities) was in charge of the inquiry into complaints. The review was very thorough and took four months to complete. It included: interviews by the Assistant Dean with 28 complaining students who were on campus, review by the Associate Dean of grades on all assignments, review of course information distributed to students (including information about grading criteria) and a discussion between the Associate Dean and the Professor about grading practices. Our investigation concluded that unspecified extra credit had been given to students who came to speak with the instructor about the course and their compositions, regardless of whether they improved their work based on his feedback, and that students had never been told that they could raise their grades simply by meeting with the instructor."


This is bullshit. Of course he's not solely grading based on the actual quality of their compositions, because it's a non-major course, so these aren't going to be music people. But I know Appleton well enough to say this: he's a hardass Prof, but even if you suck at making music you can make up for that by going to see him all the time and making it clear that you're busting your balls. There was no unspecified extra credit. He gave higher marks to the kids he saw putting in more work.

Let's face it, kids, perceived effort makes up a large part of our grades in a bunch of departments (see my music grades, my Japanese grades all freshman year). These fuckers thought it'd be an easy A, and they didn't go to office hours, and they put their shit off till the last second, and he gave them Bs and Cs, and they weren't having that shit, not with mommy and Carol Folt to back 'em up.

Appleton is a Goddamned genius and this is an embarrassment to the college. Those kids should be ashamed of themselves. Fucking pussies.

I'm going to see if he's around later this weekend to go talk to. Seal, maybe I'll come up with something for that pinko paper of yours to run.