TheRandomLoller's Corner ;)

Prof says he’ll grade students on a curve, so they organize a boycott of the exams and all get As

anexperimentallife:
saysomethinghuman:
mostlysignssomeportents:
Johns Hopkins Computer Science prof Professor Peter Fröhlich grades his students on a curve: the highest score on the final gets an A and everyone else is graded accordingly.
Clever students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” figured out that this meant that if they all boycotted the exam, they’d all get As.
So they organized a boycott, milling around the hall outside the class where the exams were being sat, sternly reminding each other that if no one sat the exam they’d all get straight As, ignoring Fröhlich’s pleas to come and sit the exam.
Fröhlich praised his students’ solidarity: “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done. At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible.”
https://boingboing.net/2018/04/24/hang-together-or-hang-separate-2.html
Who will ride or die with me this hard
I love that even the professor was like, “YES! They did good!”
He told a bunch of PROGRAMMING students that he was going to grade on a curve.
PROGRAMING.
Like half of programming is looking at sorting algorithms and asking “what could break this?” They looked at the grading algorithm (curve grading) and noticed “if every grade is the same, everything is at the top of the list” and “the easiest way to get all the grades to be the same is to set them all to zero.”
Of course the professor praised them. He may have taught them the exact type of logic that had them organize the boycott in the first place. They found a bug in his grading system and loudly exploited it.