The Ethics of Extra-Credit

I’ll admit to you upfront that I like a sure thing as much as the next guy; it makes me an annoying opponent in a card game or a tactical simulation, but it comes in handy every time I take on the chief operations officer or executive officer position, and it has saved a few of my consulting clients from the fruits of their own folly on occasion. So, as you might imagine, I’ve offered my own students the opportunity for extra-credit assignments ever since I became a teacher myself. Looking over the stack of them on my desk today, however, I’ve realized that what I only intended as a way for some of my students who are unlucky, over-committed, or possessed of more work ethic than intellect to do better in my class has gotten a bit murky on several dimensions, and I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at the concept…

First off, you have the obvious problem that my extra-credit assignments have to involve actual work, or they won’t be fair to any of the students who didn’t bother about doing one. Unfortunately, they’re also enormously popular with that class of student who is all about gaming the system – which in this case means getting the highest grades possible while doing the smallest possible amount of work. Consequently, I get examples every year where someone has filled out the required number of pages by repeating the question, restating their summary information four or five times, or using double or triple spacing and margins that take up a third of the available space. I don’t award the full number of points for these, and the authors will almost inevitably end up whining on my email about “But I did the assignment! I should get all of the points!” when, in fact, they gave me two pages of writing and seven pages of nonsense…

Then there’s the fact that these assignments offer an advantage to those individuals who have the best writing and research skills (I usually do research papers). I try to get around that by having a wide range of topics – and by awarding the same number of points for a really interesting 5-page paper that a routine 10-page paper would get (and more than a boring 12-pager would receive). I will also try to give some leeway to my non-native speakers (typically 10 to 20 percent of the class), since, in fairness, their knowledge of English is far superior to what my understanding of Korean, Chinese, Farsi, or any other language is ever going to be. But the truth is, a lot of my students are also accounting, finance or marketing majors, who are better at mathematics than I’m ever going to be, but don’t regard a ten-page paper as being an easy afternoon’s work the way I do. Native speaker or not, this assignment is difficult for them – and I still have to mark them off for poor grammar, colloquial diction, or sub-standard formatting, or (as noted above) the assignment will not be fair to the others…

Of course, I also get people who are lifting entire passages of their paper from other sources – both papers written by other students in other universities, and (in the more extreme cases) even parts of the scholarly papers they are supposed to be reviewing for me. Dealing with the plagiarism itself isn’t a big problem – there are official rules for that, and I have no more choice in enforcing them than any other instructor does – but I always worry about the ones I haven’t caught: have I just given an “A” to someone whose family had more money to give them? There’s also the issue of busting people who are only trying to get a passing grade and graduate instead of failing and being sent home in disgrace, of course, but that will come up whether or not I offer extra credit assignments. Am I just leaving myself open to being swindled by students with more money than ethics by doing this?

Of course, whining, cheating, and an unfair/uneven playing field are issues I have to deal with regardless; basic issues like inconsistent education levels within the U.S. (and sometimes within individual states) would insure that no matter what I did. But the question remains: am I giving the unlucky but hard-working a second chance by offering extra-credit assignments? Or am I merely giving the lazy, the dishonest, and the very persuasive an advantage not available to my more honest students this way?

It’s worth thinking about…