It’s hilarious to me that the bureaucracy of this university couldn’t allow even a single grade above an A in this exceptional circumstance - I wonder if it actually came down to some hard limit in their grade keeping system, or if some grumpy recordskeeper just said, “Nope, this is how we’ve always done things, so this is how we will always do things.”
The world is not as rigid as northern Europe thinks it is...
Far more rule and law-bending is happening than that, for the possibility of "inventing a new grade" to be really impossible/surprising.
The only problem was they legally had to go through a open contest for the position.
So when someone came up with 5x the qualifications (citations, papers, conferences, better universities attended, etc, globally too) than their ho-hum friend (some relative of the dean), the professor body suddenly folded the position.
A few months later, they announced a new opening, with some specially crafted qualifications, so that only their friend could pass.
> In 1994, the A* grade was added above the grade A, to further differentiate attainment at the very highest end of the qualification. This remained the highest grade available until 2017.
The grades are now 1-9, with 9 being the highest and above A*.
In this particular case, I think it certainly is within a University's remit to award a special grade given the exceptional circumstances.
Another example of the US inching toward the metric system ;-)
Although yes, the UK too is in this hybrid world where gas (petrol/diesel) is in litres, temperature is in Celsius, but vehicle speedometers are in miles per hour and feet and inches are very popular for height, measuring rooms and furniture, etc.
Universities have their own ideas
This is not some kind of overreach of bureaucracy.
Bah! That's grade-inflation, pure and simple. In my day, the grades topped out at cough4.0. Back in my day, a 4.0 coughreally meant somethingcough, not like these cough hold on, I gotta re-up my inhaler-
Ok, where was I?
Oh, right - Get off my lawn!
:)
This is absolutely an example of rigid bureaucracy at work.
Also, you now are eligible for grade changes in past English classes because you used the word "can't" figuratively to describe a literal situation. Whether the grade changes occur and if they go up or down is up to the systems maintaining the grades and the teachers.
In all seriousness, this is not rigid bureaucracy preventing something that would be useful. Just because prof have such an emotional reaction to someones unusual effort does not mean new grade has a reason to exist.
They already went way outside, above and beyond anything I could've imagined. How do you change a grade decades after the course? Surely they're locked down soon after. To me, just going off and making it an A (rather than the professor just saying "well I've got egg on my face don't I?") is already incredible and a generous deviation from the bureaucracy.
There's literally an infinite number of ways to adapt the system to allow for a higher-than-A grade. Choosing to not do it is still a choice.
I'm not claiming they should've done anything different. I'm merely making sure bureaucracy's responsibility in this matter is pinned down.
* It is not up to me to decide that, it would be overreaching my mandate to make that change. * This is against my moral values. * This is against rules that everyone else bothered to follow.
All these are valid choices and right choices. The bureaucracy responsibility in cases like this is literally to resist the pressure to make exception just so someone feels good.
Numberphile has a nice video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzrRkhU248A
>In 2016, Zach Elkins, a professor in the UT Department of Government, became interested in Watson's story and began to document its origins. He tracked down Sharon Waite, who had left academia in the 1980s to work on her family's citrus farm. Elkins suggested to Waite that they change Watson's grade. In 2017, Elkins submitted a grade change form with Waite's signature and a grade change to "A+". In an interview with NPR, Waite stated, "Goodness, he certainly proved he knew how to work the Constitution and what it meant and how to be politically active, [...] So, yes, I think he deserves an A after that effort — A-plus!" The registrar approved a grade change to "A", because the university does not give grades higher than "A".
How has this not yet been made into a comedy?