How Very Appealing

[tcpip]

In the past fortnight, as other events took priority, I received positive results from two academic appeals. The first was from the University of London, where I've been plodding my way through a GradDip in Economics through the LSE for a few years. As is their archaic and lazy approach, the LSE takes a traditional examination approach (i.e., 100% of all assessment depends on a single three-hour exam, no reference material, etc), which is pretty much mocked by every educational theorist on the planet. But how to manage this during COVID? Through an invigilator application, of course. So when this was announced, I asked whether it would be available for my preferred operating system. Four months later, i.e., after the examination period had concluded, I was informed that, no, it was not available. I submitted an appeal requesting a refund of my course fees and, surprisingly, the University agreed that was an unreasonable period of time to wait for a ticket response. This is, for what it's worth, not the first time that the University of London has been absolutely terrible on its administrative side, so I'll be packing up my bags from that institution and going elsewhere.

The second appeal relates to my recent studies in psychology at the University of Auckland. As regular readers may recall I recently submitted a persuasive essay on the hoary question of when a person becomes an adult. To approach this, I used the methodology of formal pragmatics, especially emphasising matters of domain confusion between biology, law, and agency, and the need to differentiate between maturity, legality, and recognise individual variation. I thought I did a pretty good job of it, so I was very surprised when I received a low grade. The comments suggested to me that the marker didn't understand the approach I had taken and had missed the key points I was making; so I submitted an appeal explaining this to the course coordinator who re-marked the essay. As a result, the mark almost doubled from being one of the lowest in the class (a marginal fail, "D") to one of the highest (a clear first, "A"). It would seem that my concern that the marker didn't quite understand the method and content was correct, which is quite a danger when an essay is meant to be persuasive; "Where ignorance is bliss, Tis folly to be wise", as Gray wrote.

Appeals processes don't always work out of course. I remember taking an education subject at Murdoch University where the marker evaluated my grade for the wrong course, which had a different word count (my reduced mark was heavily based on not reaching the expected word count). The most remarkable thing was that the course coordinator backed the marker even though it was an objective fact that the marker got it wrong - my speculation is they had to back the tutor, maybe they already were already on a performance question. Curiously, when I did the exam for said course (essays and short answers) I received a frankly implausible 100%. It was all a bit disconcerting, given that for decades I have been an advocate for Murdoch's original (1973) Educational Objectives. Still, the bottom line is, if you think you have good grounds to appeal against a grade or administrative decision at a University make use of that power. Sometimes it pays off.

Comments

[vatine]

I, once, approached my lecturer to try to complain that a 0 on a question/answer should have been a 3, as that would have taken me from a "fail" to a "3" (the grades were "fail", "3", "4", and "5"; answers were graded 0, 1, 2, or 3 points, to get a grade N, you needed at least 3N points and at least N questions at 2 or higher).

It was a propositional logic exam, and I argued that taking the proof sequence from syntactic to semantic, and then back, was a totally valid approach, even if it had not been explicitly mentioned in the course. The lecturer said yes, that probably makes sense, remarked it from 0 to 3, then flipped through my test and up-marked quite a few more, making me go from a "fail" to a "5".

I almost managed to get an essay marked from a 5 to an F, though. I followed the brief, "write about a computer subject and learn something". I wrote about the classic unix scheduling algorithm, and I learned LaTeX. Apparently, we were supposed to "learn something about computers, then write about what you learned".

[tcpip]

The second example is a rather ironic confirmation of the validity of your approach in the first!

Semantics matter!