Students from JHU’s Professor Peter Frohlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer Science Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” classes made the internet news when Inside Higher Ed and Total Frat Move wrote about their boycotting of Frohlich’s final exam this past December.
Inside Higher Ed wrote the following:
“Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person gets 100 percent and everybody else gets a percentage relative to it,” said Fröhlich.”
Students in the above three classes took advantage of this policy when they figured out that by not taking the exam everyone would recieve a 100 on the final and thus, an A in the class.
Professor Frohlich’s response? “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done,” he said via e-mail. “At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible.”
Photo courtesy of Inside Higher Ed