"Students said [Bryan] Kohberger had a strong grasp of the subject matter but was a harsh grader..."

"... giving extensive critiques of assignments and then defending the lower marks when students complained as a group. Later in the fall, roughly around the time of the killings, [Hayden Stinchfield, 20, one of the students in that class] said Mr. Kohberger seemed to start giving better grades, and the assignments that once had his feedback scrawled across every paragraph began coming back clean."

From "Idaho Murder Suspect Had Been a Student of the Criminal Mind/The arrest of a graduate student in the murder of four University of Idaho students eased fears but raised a troubling new question: What was the motive?" (NYT). Kohberger studied criminology and served as a teaching assistant.

University of Wisconsin Chief Diversity Officer rejects insinuations that our diversity plan involves race/ethnicity-based grading.

Here's the new statement from Professor Patrick Sims, Chief Diversity Officer and interim vice provost for Diversity and Climate. (And here's my post from last Friday about the insinuations.)

Sims writes:

The concept of Inclusive Excellence allows institutions to engage diversity from a vantage poin [sic] of alignment with campus quality efforts, underscoring the educational benefits of diversity for all students, while emphasizing it as a central value of the institution. These laudable goals serve as the backbone for how institutions like UW-Madison, which have a long and rich tradition of academic rigor and excellence, can make excellence more inclusive, hence the term Inclusive Excellence.

That kind of bureaucratese is unlikely to stanch the rumors unless it convinces you that the whole plan is nothing but an incantation that sounds good to the people who like the sound of bureaucratese.

Anyway, as I said in my post last Friday, the "Inclusive Excellence" concept wasn't even part of the plan the faculty senate adopted, as Sims says toward the end of his statement. It did appear in another document, and even there, the "proportional and equitable distribution of grades" was intended to result not from race/ethnic-discrimination in grading but from — as Sims puts it — "fostering living and learning spaces that are inclusive."

I suspect that those who jumped to assume that there would be grade discrimination will say that they don't believe that inclusive "living and learning spaces" will achieve the goals. But that doesn't mean those who wrote and adopted the plan will resort to cheating.

On the other hand, here's a great article in The New Yorker about how the No Child Left Behind guidelines led a very good and admirable middle school teacher to participate in blatant cheating on test-scoring.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison's "'Diversity' Plan Involves Grading By Race And Ethnicity"... really?

The quote part of my question, above, comes from Instapundit, who is paraphrasing John Leo (at Minding the Campus) who wrote. Leo wrote:

Professors, instead of just awarding the grade that each student earns, would apparently have to adjust them so that academically weaker, "underrepresented racial/ethnic" students perform at the same level and receive the same grades as academically stronger students.

Apparently. That's a pretty big "apparently," omitted by Instapundit [who also includes the Leo quote], and I cannot figure out what motivated Leo to make that leap to the point where he could say what he said even with the "apparently."

Naturally, the University of Wisconsin wants a diverse student body and wants all of the students to do well in their classes and to graduate. It's a pretty dismal diversity policy that looks only at whether once underrepresented groups are now well represented. If the admissions process works to increase diversity, we don't just sit back and congratulate ourselves. We have the additional duty to provide a good educational experience to all of the students who come here.

That doesn't mean the plan is to adjust grades by race and ethnicity!

Milwaukee Public Schools get rid of letter grades and stop giving credit for good behavior, extra assignments, and handing things in on time.

One parent says "I think (district administrators) want letter grades to go away because they want to blur the line of failing students," but:

Administrators say the changes capture a more nuanced picture of a student's academic progress.

Nuance!

"The grade distribution for all courses at UW-Madison is available going back to the spring 2004 semester."

"Unlike studies of aggregate grades that document grade inflation with time, this site provides grade distributions for each individual course and section. The data clearly shows that students in STEM courses at Madison receive markedly lower grades than students in education courses."

An essay on dignity.

That WaPo apology got me thinking about this: From "Welcome to the Dollhouse," a movie I highly recommend.