LETTER: Buying the grade
To the editor:
Today I became aware that a yoga class is allowing students to excuse their absences by donating to charity – USU has become lesser for this. Now, I know yoga barely counts as a class anyway and I won’t go into the argument of whether classes like yoga should even count toward a college degree, but let’s face it, plenty of classes offer extra credit for “charitable donations” – same problem, different name. The fact is, certain professors in the Huntsman School of Business routinely offer credit to students willing to buy it in the form of donations to the SEED charity. In one class, students who successfully raised $1,000 for SEED during a class project were excused from the final. In other classes, students have been awarded extra credit, specifically for the mere act of donating money to SEED.
I want to pause and ask the members of the USU society, where is your pride? You seniors, in a few short weeks will don your robes and receive the degree awarded to you by Utah State University. When you do, look to your left, look to your right, realize that the person you are standing next to could be receiving that degree because they bought their grade. The fact that the money goes to charity is no excuse. Your achievement is being subverted, fight for it! USU is a college, not a glorified charity. Faculty! Shame on you! You are taking blatant advantage of your students and exploiting your ability to determine their grades!
It is my most sincere hope that on Wednesday, there is a letter in this paper telling me that this degradation of USU as a place of higher education is not a practice, but instead the occasional folly of a misguided professor. I hope that letter will tell me professors do not consistently offer spurious extra credit for money and unrelated academic exercises. But if that letter tries to claim that the amount of extra credit bought by money is trivial, too trivial to warrant outrage, then I will tell you right now, it is NOT trivial. Any time the honest achievement of a single student is subverted, it is NOT trivial. If USU has any pride, it will prohibit any act that allows students to cheat “the system,” whether justified by faculty or not.
Patrick Macala