Arizona Bill Would Let College Students Appeal Grades If They Allege Political Bias

[Belsnickel]

Are there professors that grade in a biased manner? 100%. It isn't always political, but it will always exist because they are human. Working in academia I am constantly around faculty and believe me, the non-faculty employees in higher education have even worse opinions of the professors than the general public. One of the most common issues I have seen with grading is not really explicitly political or ideological in a more broad sense, but just more about professors being challenged. So many of them have a hard time with students challenging them, which is itself problematic because the liberal arts is supposed to be about engaging students in the ability to think critically about topics and challenge their preconceived notions, meanwhile these professors aren't willing to continue their lifelong education by doing it themselves.

The university I work at is known as a leader in university assessment. For decades we have been analyzing the living shit out of our students and faculty to improve our methods and as a result there is a heavy emphasis on the use of rubrics in grading anything requiring a written component. That doesn't mean all the faculty listen to this--they do enjoy academic freedom after all--but what it does allow is a clear set of expectations for a student when writing a paper and they could then take the grade and plead their case to the faculty member saying that they feel they met the criteria on the rubric. No conversation about politics or anything, just here are the expectations you set, we are in disagreement on how well I met them, let's discuss.

The problem is that it is still fallible because of human involvement. You will never eliminate that. Students should be empowered to speak up for themselves and argue their positions, but laws like this are honestly bad faith attempts at fixing the problem from my point of view.