Is it ethical to award points for hilariously bad answers?

Question

Q: Why are the outer planets of the Solar System so much more massive than the inner planets?

A: By the central limit theorem, everything eventually appears to look like a Bell curve. Therefore planet masses increase with distance to the Sun before decreasing, and the planets at the end of the distribution (Mercury & Pluto) have small masses while the planets in the middle (Jupiter) have large masses.

One doesn't need to know anything about astronomy or planetary formation to know this answer is nonsense. Furthermore, the student should have known that Pluto isn't a planet (Mars is also less massive than both the Earth and Jupiter, and Neptune is more massive than Uranus as well, breaking the trend).

On the other hand, it's funny nonsense. Funny nonsense has gotten immortalized as internet jokes, and if the joke is to be believed, even led to an 'A' for the student. There's even a journal for funny research.

Is it ethical to award a few points for this answer?

Answer 1

Is it ethical to award a few points for this answer?

No.

It does not demonstrate understanding. If I wrote a good-intentioned, but poor answer and got the same amount of points, I'd be peeved.

Answer 2

I tend to give at least 1 point out of 10 for almost anything that could be construed as being relevant to the question.

Compared to the responses I tend to give 1/10 for, this is better in several regards:

• It has a logic to it.
• The writer obviously knows it is wrong.
• The writer demonstrates knowledge of something (in this case normal distributions).
• The writer demonstrates some intellectual creativity.

It depends somewhat on my standards for partial credit on the problem, but I'll probably give a good coherent joke response 3/10. On occasion it might be 2/10 if I feel like I need to reserve 3/10 for slightly correct responses that are less good than some responses I'm giving 4/10 for.

Let's face it - awarding of partial credit isn't perfectly accurate, and any numerical score I give has an error bar of a few percent. (Almost always, the central limit theorem works and the errors mostly cancel out rather than stacking up, leaving still a few percent error.) I think it's fine to put a thumb on the noise here.

Answer 3

It depends on what form of ethics you are following.

Virtue ethics? Truth is a virtue; this answer is not true, so to reward it as though it was the truth is dishonest and unethical. Your job is to reward truthful answers, not funny ones, so you would be in dereliction of your duty.

Hedonic ethics? What matters is making people happy. Giving the student extra marks will make him happy, but if the students who gave more accurate answers find out, it will make them all unhappy. Allowing that to happen would be unethical. Therefore we must consider whether they are likely to find out...

Kantian deontological ethics? What if every examiner always gave points for funny answers? It would create a situation where the ability to tell jokes was more useful for achieving qualifications than studying. This would be bad for society. Therefore, this is unethical.

Answer 4

My interpretation would be that they didn't know the accepted answer, and so tried to use their physics intuition to invent a theory of solar system formation on the spot. It seems they came up with something similar to Laplace's collapsing rotating dust cloud, and as a hypothesis for why this dust cloud is thicker in the middle and thin at the inner and outer extremes, the random collisions of particles in the cloud resulting in a Normal distribution is at first glance a plausible guess.

There are two aspects to this on which you could assign marks. Were they able to recite the memorised textbook answer they were told to learn? Not knowing the answer, were they able to invent a valid physical theory of their own to explain it? The latter is a much more sophisticated question. To judge it, one would need to know how much they knew about the solar system that their theory has to explain.

This would seem like a perfect opening to start a conversation about the history of early theories of solar system formation, the features they had to explain, new research on extrasolar planets, and point them towards physical reasoning, not just the rote memorisation of facts. If you put yourself in the place of Descartes or Laplace, how would you develop a physics-based explanation? That's an important skill too, and ethically you can and should judge them on how well they did it.

I'd not take off any points for calling Pluto a planet - from the point of view of discussing the physics of solar system formation, the distinction is not material. And minor exceptions to the general trend of masses might be explained by random variation. Small-sample histograms of the Normal distribution are often irregular. Are there stronger objections to their theory that they ought to have known about?

Answer 5

It is possible that the student believes it to be correct (I don't know the student or his/her typical performance). Treating a serious but wrong answer as a joke could be insulting to the student who sees the feedback.

Either way, you can give written feedback in addition to a grade. Even if the answer does not deserve points, you can leave comments on it for the student.

Answer 6

It's fine if the question is already getting undeserved partial credit. Otherwise it doesn't seem very professional. I usually write a very small 0 (a big 0 feels like "how dare you disrespect my test -- you get a ZERO, with extreme prejudice!")

Sometimes many other people are getting undeserved partial credit on the same Q with "write anything to try to get some credit" answers. Realistically those are worth 0, but often get 2/10 for the barely relevant parts they threw in by mistake. Esp if TA's are grading. Essentially, the Q has 2 free points. It seems fair to give a joke answer those same 2. If someone calls you on giving 2 points for a joke you can tell them, in nicer words "the joke showed as much understanding as the other answers worth 2".

A joke answer is the same thing as "I don't know". It's better than a blank page (you don't have to wonder if the student didn't see it, and might want to make it up since their test was sticky or something). You're not rewarding a joke -- you're appreciating honesty and not wasting your time.

But if a student completely skips a Q, doesn't even know how to start it, the rest of their scores are often a mess, too. They know they're not passing the class and it makes no difference what score you give it. Giving them 3/10 is just a nice "I don't hate you for failing my class" gesture.

Answer 7

Maybe I can give some insight as I am a student who gives such answers quite regular and quite regular earns some points for it.

The impact you create usually is quite low. Assuming you, as most people do, only grant a very small, near insignificant amount of points. Most of my exams have 120 points (for 120 mins) and if I earn Points for such answers it is not much. I would say a Median of 1 and a max of 3. Overall exams, I earn maybe an average of 0.2 (0,16%) points per exam maybe less. This also means that my peers usually aren't even interested enough in it to try it themselves. The best it usually does is making a good anecdote. I also would like to compare it to missed points in exams, which I was supposed to get but didn't, I spot an average of ~3 (2,5%) per exam.

To finally answer your question. Yes, sure, it can be ethical, but it deepens wich ethic you would consider. The negative impact it usualy has is quite low and therefore the threshold to make it ethical is as well.

The last thing, I think, what you should ask yourself as well is: Does it encourage better learning? Which is, I think, a hard to answer question. But for me personally, it did.

Answer 8

A free form question to be answered by many students ideally has a grading rubric, otherwise it is next to impossible to keep grading consistent across graders and over time, not even within a single batch of tests. The rubric will generally not intersect with the unexpected joke.

Supposing I own the rubric alone: the joke will generally not be worth the effort to adapt the rubric to accommodate that kind of answer with a non-zero score (and maybe re-grade previous answers accordingly). The comical effect will wear off before this is accomplished.

I'd go with zero points and a smiley, unless I can honestly construe parts of the answer as demonstrating particular items in the rubric I'm applying.

Answer 9

If the awarding of points to such a student doesn't disadvantage other students in any way, then sure, it is fine to do it. The only problems occur if another person suffers in some way because of it.

And, assuming that this is a real case and not made up, it is possible that the person awarding the points has some information that the student knows a better answer (I certainly don't) and is just having a bit of fun.

Ideally, grading is of individuals, not groups. The grade of an individual student is based entirely on what that student does, not in any way on what the class as a whole (or worse, classes in the past) do. There is no predefined distribution that grades are forced to adhere to. I'm happy if every student gets full marks. If they all get zeros I'm not happy, but I know what must be done, at least. If you keep that principle at the front then lots of such questions become moot.

Of course, another issue is whether awarding those points helps that student or hurts them. Giving good grades because of, for example, hair color, would be wrong because it doesn't contribute to the learning process of the student. But I see no such harm here. It is a discrete event.

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Hmmm. Is it because the gas giants sweep out a larger circumference and hence picked up more material from the primordial gas cloud? Just guessing.

And the status of Pluto is just a judgement call.