I've been off-blog lately (lost my server so lost my feed-on-feeds newsfeeds :-( ) and have also been struggling with my conscience. This year, to deter plagiarism, I've requested the early submission of a subsection of the work I usually have handed-in at the end of term (to check on progress and provided earlier feedback, ostensibly.) Because I'm keen on promoting web standards I warned the students I would expect valid XHTML and CSS in all their work. Most of 'em did validation in year 1 and this is year 2 so it was not an unreasonable thing to expect. So I gave 10 marks out of a possible 33 for valid XHTML in a particular exercise whose main point was to take some nasty old HTML4 and XHTML-ise it.
So far, so good, still many students lost the marks but it's 3% of one exercise out of 12 that'll form 40% of their final assessment, so overall the validation points are worth at most 1% of the final module mark (and probably less as the exercise was kinda trivial it'll receive a lower weight than the more complex JavaScript exercises later in the module.)
However one particular student was disappointed to lose those marks as he made a minor change to his work (in good faith) just before submitting it and it resulted in an invalid document. The change was laudable and garnered the two students (out of 140) who attempted it a few bonus marks, and so lost this student 6 marks overall due to the loss of validation. (So that's 6/33/12 of 40% or less than 1%.)
He requested that I explain why he got less then 100% for the exercise at the end of a lecture that finished early (4.30 PM rather than 5 PM) explaining that he knew I was probably tired but that it was what I got paid for
, which I felt was unnecessarily combative IMO but I agreed and we spent some time wading through his mark-up whilst I explained my reasoning (which he already knew as I had published my marking scheme in lieu of direct, individual feedback.) I explained that as his mark-up was invalid XHTML it would lose the relevant marks but that his attempt to be clever had earned him some bonus points. He left after 20 minutes, I guess slightly abruptly, but I was tired and felt I'd done enough explaining to satisfy him.
Apparently not: he sent me an email a couple of hours later with a definitely chewed-over tone to it that annoyed me and took me an hour to reply to in a calm, reasonable tone -- pointlessly as it turned-out because I simply irritated him further and his second email just reiterated his position that he felt I was being unfair. So I spoke to him the next day at the start of his lab session and asked if he was OK with my decision regarding the points. This led to a further 20 minute discussion which I eventually terminated with no progress (after becoming increasingly upset by the student's attitude and attempts to use psychology on me.) My standpoint was that he submitted invalid XHTML so lost marks. His was that he'd tried to do something innovative that had led to the mistake and he'd felt under pressure due to the approaching deadline and had accidentally forgotten to re-validate the mark-up so he did not deserve to lose the marks and should be treated "as an individual".
Overall it was a major waste of both of our time and I learned a valuable lesson: sometimes it's pointless to explain/reason/whatever, don't bother, be dictatorial and say "That's the way it is." It saves time...
