It can be enough to drive a person crazy!

I’m talking about when a policy is clear cut so you go along with it and then…the person who made up the policy gets angry with you for using it.

Huh?!?!

That’s a real head-scratcher!

And this story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page definitely falls into that category.

It started in a class they were taking…

If you don’t want me to take advantage of your grading policy, then you shouldn’t have had the policy that you did.

“Taking a class, the class is graded on 7 different projects of increasing difficulty then we have a final at the end. And your projects are worth 60% of your grade and final is worth 40%.

The policy was clear.

The policy is they will drop the lowest project grade to calculate your grade.

In the first 6 projects I got 5 perfect scores (100 out of 100) and my lowest grade was 85 out of 100 (this was the first project I had some mistakes which I learned from). The last project seemed particularly long and annoying and I’m quite busy with a lot of other things. I emailed the professor to clarify his grading policy and he tells me I still need to submit something otherwise the policy won’t apply.

They did the minimum amount of work required.

So I submit my project, and my project is literally just the title of the project, my name, a summary of the project, and that’s it. Took me about 5 minutes…if that. I submit.

The teacher wasn’t happy.

He tells me its incomplete, I tell him thats the project I’m submitting, he tells me I’m going get a really bad grade on this project I say that’s fine. I looked at the grading rubric I should get 5 points. (we get 5 points for name/title).

He tells me I’m abusing his grading policy, I tell him its his grading policy. He tells me he’s not going drop my lowest grade and instead of having a 97.5% project grade I’ll have a 84.2% project grade.

Other people got involved.

I go to his department chair, I CC him, I highlight the part in the syllabus where it clearly states lowest project grade will be dropped, I also attach the email of him confirming this policy and clearly stating something needs to be submitted to be graded for the policy to qualify.

The chair responds and says that the policy outlined in the syllabus needs to be the policy that’s followed and therefore when it comes time to calculating my final grade he needs to drop my lowest project grade…which in this case would be 5% grade.

O I already thought about the final and how that might impact his grading of my final, but his final is going be multiple choice/auto graded final.

They admitted they did this. Loud and clear.

The malicious part is I obviously submitted subpar work knowing that the work would get a bad grade but it wouldn’t matter because that grade would be dropped.

Professor tried to back out, but department chair told him he needs to honor his grading policy.

And they explained why.

A few reasons why I did this

Had I done the final project I would probably spent 8-10 hours working on it. My project grade would have gone from 97.5% to 100% best case (assuming I got a 100% on it) and I would have had less time to prepare for my final.

If those 8 hours I spent preparing for my final nets me an extra 10% on my final thats worth more then the max benefit of 2.5% I’d have gotten from doing my final project.

Also that’s assuming I’d have gotten 100% obviously anything better then 85% would have improved my grade, but the scale would still be somewhere from 0% to 2.5% improvement.”

Check out how Reddit users reacted.

This person had professors who did things like this before.

One Reddit user had a great professor in the past.

This individual said this was all up to the person who wrote the story.

And this person has dealt with this from both sides.

Hey, only following the rules!

Nice work!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parent’s 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.