[NOT OC - REPOST]

Good morning, all!

As much as I’d like to start this off by saying things like “Let me tell you a little bit about me”, or “I’m so petty I performed at the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2008” and then go into a diatribe about just how petty I could be, this is far from the truth. Perhaps in some alternate petti-verse where over a dozen college students were playing the part of (and absolutely nailing) whiny middle school students complaining about course requirements… or if they happened to begin to repeatedly harass me by way of being on ingrate-demo-mode, or spinning the wheel-of-you-suck-at-teaching to come up with yet another complainsult wrapped in a thinly veiled “question” about me and how I run my course…perhaps then I’d let nature take it’s “course” and let my pettiness bloom, like a flower transplanted from an artificial habitat to a campus-bordering field, in the form of Malicious Compliance.

And wouldn’t you know it? Somehow. Some way. Petty finds a way.

That being said, I really try to be a positive, supportive, caring, empathetic, far-from-sardonic college instructor. My clientele, as referenced above, are mostly college-age students who enrolling in what is basically a Pre-Algebra course my community college likes to call “College Math”. I have the occasional young whiz kid who enrolls in my course to be super advanced. But for the most part, young adults in their 20s and 30s are who I teach, and Solving Systems of Equations by Substitution is currently what I teach them.

I have many students who struggle and require additional tutoring, and I’m always happy to oblige. There is this one student who I wish would show up to our makeshift tutoring group but never does… let’s call her “Mara”.

Mara acts like she’s the zhit. She seriously acts like we’re back in high school, interrupt my demonstrations (miraculously, because I literally direct instruct for 3-5 minutes before I popcorn around the room and treat it like a very large standard tutoring session). “Mr. OP, my Dad says this isn’t the way to solve it…”, “Mr. OP, why don’t you teach at ASU? (our partnering major university we transfer students to) What did you do wrong that youre teaching at this place?”, the list goes on and on. For brevity’s sake (ha) I’ll make sure this story doesn’t.

We have an exam that about half the class got a 90 or better on, followed by most of the rest getting B’s, C’s etc. I know that this community college, despite it’s cheap cost, still has many students on full scholarship for one thing or another, whether it be sports, personal hardships, activities, etc. That being said, if I notice a student tanked the test I may just grade the thing on a curve to allow them to get the most points possible. This is what I chose to do for Mara, and she wound up with an 18/25 on her exam. I typed in the score, took a glance at her paper afterward and realized she actually missed yet another question, a major one, that would have brought her grade super super low. I decided to look the other way. Part laziness, part… being nice. Let’s not say how much each part’s worth, but they ain’t equal.

So it’s time to return the tests that I already had graded in the system when Mara starts up with her questions again. They are literally too tiresome to include. I will say her final piece, however: “Mr. OP, I noticed that you gave me an 18/25 on my last test, could I take a look at the test and see what I got wrong? I definitely didn’t miss that much.”

I tried to use inflection to let her know that she should probably just be happy with the 18, by saying “Yeahhhhh I thiiiiink I’d be happy with the 18 there kiddo”

Then she suddenly dropped a petty pebble at the top of a snowy hill…

She continues… this time standing, walking toward me, and pointing her Cruella DeVille finger at me, saying

“NO! You can’t just put WHATEVER you want for my grade, 18 out of 25 is not even possible!! I need to keep my GPA high because of all my scholarships!! You need to grade my test ACCURATELY!”

Enter PettyLicious Compliance.

I knew good and well that she did NOT deserve, by any stretch of the imagination, anywhere NEAR the 72% that 18/25 is. She didn’t master 72% of the content. She didn’t get 72% of the questions correct. I’ll be honest and say that when I grade dozens of exams I tend to look at the most important questions on each test and ensure these are 100 percent accurate. I always pepper in some spiraling thinky-type questions, you know, stuff with rigor, but I don’t grade against it. If I ever make an error in grading, it 150% of the time favors the student.

I took her particular course’s papers out of my Blah-tache case, file through the exams and find her particular one, and look at it… quizzically… then I look back at here while my head is still positioned toward the paper. I’m trying so hard to give her an out…she wouldn’t budge…

So I say "You know what? You’re right… I did make an error… oh, crud, more than one… "

I then behind my desk where the students couldn’t see what I was lookng at I graded her paper right then and there. By this time I had memorized the answers to the exam without even needing to pull out the key, but I did so I made sure she knew I was grading it thoroughly… you know, ACCURATELY.

She wound up with a 14/25. I handed it back to her right then and there, and let her know that I had changed the grade accordingly in her gradebook. That 14 she got (one of the solutions to the system she just managed to solve for Y but not for X) turned her High C to a solid D. She looked through the exam, scouring it, looking like the toy man from Toy Story, using an infinitely increasing series of overlapping lenses to look for one miniscule error on my part. I also made sure I took a picture of the test before handing it back, so she couldn’t pull the “See, I made it negative… it’s right” sort of thing. She’s done that in the past.

She quickly whipped out her phone to see how much this grade impacted her overall. She was livid without a direction to hurtle it toward. I could see that this act of Petty MC on my part was a little too far… I actually feel bad for “Mara”.

As she looked up at me I could see her eyes well up a little bit… it was that “too quiet” right before something bad was about to happen… My spidey senses were tingling (side note, this is why I hate Avengers End Game… Spider-man looked surprised at his death… he should have sensed it, right? But I digress). Before she started to take her clenched arms (that she looked like she was trying to remove the top of the desk from it’s connected chair) and turn them on me, I offered a solution.

“Look. Mara. Remember you can do corrections on the exam for a fourth of the credit back, right? That will get you almost all of the points that you were gifted in the first place. Whaddya say?”

She sheepishly agreed, wound up with a 17.5 out of 25, and has yet to give me a hard time since… but I’m pretty sure my semester survey will suffer greatly.

TLDR. Adult student requested a grade change. I complied.