Awards 2019-20

[marty]

How the heck does the ECAC pick their Winners OTW?

The Colgate women's goaltender got GOTW. The story highlights her shutout win, but she only played 1 game last weekend. Cornell's Browning got "2" shutouts in 100 min of playing time against the same 2 teams that played Colgate.

Sure Colgate's Auby had to stop 23 against Yale, while Browning only had 15, but doesn't playing 2 games mean something?

Maybe they felt that Colgate needed her shutout to win whereas we dominate so ours are less relatively "valuable"?

I'm reaching here.  I always assume all xOTW awards are decided by the AD's PA's house pets, who themselves only give it a few seconds' thought before going back to licking themselves.

But I may be projecting.

I like this but I'm not sure which I like more - the 23 save rational or the house pets decision.  Could be the pee stains on the training papers too if the pets are young.

One of our beloved Chem E professors swore that he had his wife grade our exams by throwing them down the stairs.  The higher on the stairs, the higher the grade.  In reality he worked his butt off grading 53 or so papers regarding formulas that have long ago left my leaky brain. I always tipped my hat to anyone who graded the damn things rather than throw the grading at the TA's.

But I look at these weekly awards as quizzes, not prelims and likely we will have a lot more to bitch about after the "finals".

[Trotsky]

One of our beloved Chem E professors swore that he had his wife grade our exams by throwing them down the stairs.

This is a ubiquitous grad school joke.  Faculty tends to modify it to throwing their TAs down the stairs.

[dag14]

Ubiquitous undergrad joke, too.

[Trotsky]

Ubiquitous undergrad joke, too.

The undergrad version isn't a joke, it's a Dunning Kruger whine.  People who get poor grades are least able to understand why they got poor grades.  ;-)

Note this has nothing to do with the current political situation.

[dag14]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

End of rant.  Back to hockey.

I suspect Browning did not get the award this week for the reasons you [Trotsky] articulated earlier.  Her play was clearly crucial to the outcome of the game whereas the Cornell goalie would have to give up many goals before her team was going to lose.

[Swampy]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

End of rant.  Back to hockey.

I suspect Browning did not get the award this week for the reasons you [Trotsky] articulated earlier.  Her play was clearly crucial to the outcome of the game whereas the Cornell goalie would have to give up many goals before her team was going to lose.

Tell them you're being lenient!

I remember in my fifth year in Engineering I had an applied statistics course. Our final project was a team project, and our graded final paper did not have a single negative comment. But we got an A-. So I went to see the professor and asked why we didn't get an A. He was an old guy, probably about to retire. (Which means he probably was younger than I am now. Funny how looking ahead things look so different than when looking back.) He had a great name, Henry P. Goode! In any case, he said another team had a paper that was just as good as ours, but they wrote a computer program to compute their results. He was so impressed that he gave them "the A."

In other words, back then (c. 1968) there was only one A in the entire class, although in this case it went to every student on the winning team.

As a bitter side note, I had just spent the summer working for IBM doing systems programming work. I had been a co-op student at IBM's in-house graduate school in midtown Manhattan. My job was to modify the operating system on their mainframe to keep track of how often different software was used and to design a way to analyze the data. So when Prof. Goode told me why we "only" got an A-, I felt cheated because I was confident I could have "written" the computer program. (I believe the other team used BMDP software, which essentially required entering your data on punch cards and adding a few cards to trigger the appropriate analysis.) But we had assumed the assignment wanted us to do the computations manually, using the old monster electric calculators that were bigger than typewriters. So the reason we made things harder on ourselves and  didn't "write" the computer program was because we thought we weren't allowed to do so. Knowing how relatively easy it was to use the computer, we didn't think a computer solution was legit. But computers must have been a mysterious black art for poor old Henry, which is why he was so impressed.

And unlike you, dag14, after graduating I never made it back to the Ivy League. I've spent my career teaching mainly at public institutions, a few top-tier research universities but mainly at lower ranked research and comprehensive universities. At such places one gets the same bullshit. "You gave me a C, but I'm not a C student!" is my favorite. A good chunk of the student body doesn't appreciate how lucky they are to get a B-, when if they were really being graded on their understanding of the subject a C- would be generous.

[upprdeck]

had a computer course back in the day.  a quiz every class and multiple tests everything was multiple choice..  got every question correct on 40 quizes and every test and the final.. got a B.. not even a B+.   found out later the Prof was only going to give a set number of A's out..  Of course wanted to complain but he was also the Dean of the college.. no one to complain too.

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

I remember one time where I did a ChemE problem exactly right methodologically, but about half way through dropped a sign and got the wrong answer.  I got 6 out of 10 on the quiz.  I went to the professor and asked "I showed I knew how to do the work, but just made a calculational error.  Shouldn't I get credit for knowing how to solve the problem?"  His response was "If you do that in the real world, your plant won't work."

It's something I never forgot and taught to the junior engineers I worked with.

[marty]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

I remember one time where I did a ChemE problem exactly right methodologically, but about half way through dropped a sign and got the wrong answer.  I got 6 out of 10 on the quiz.  I went to the professor and asked "I showed I knew how to do the work, but just made a calculational error.  Shouldn't I get credit for knowing how to solve the problem?"  His response was "If you do that in the real world, your plant won't work."

Thorpe or Harriott?

[Beeeej]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

I remember one time where I did a ChemE problem exactly right methodologically, but about half way through dropped a sign and got the wrong answer.  I got 6 out of 10 on the quiz.  I went to the professor and asked "I showed I knew how to do the work, but just made a calculational error.  Shouldn't I get credit for knowing how to solve the problem?"  His response was "If you do that in the real world, your plant won't work."

It's something I never forgot and taught to the junior engineers I worked with.

In one of my two Physics classes, I was marked wrong on a quiz question and ended up arguing about it with the TA in front of the class. The problem was concerned with Relativity, or Doppler shift, or something related (give me a break, I was an English major and it was 30 years ago). So because the question referred to the relevant stationary object as "an observer," I took that to mean a human being, which is three-dimensional - and if that were accurate, my answer to the question would have been correct. But the TA insisted that everybody else knew he meant a single point in space. Why on earth would you call a single point in space "an observer"?? If that's standard for that area of the science, fine, but this was a class for non-majors, and he should have worded the question more clearly. He ended up snottily declaring, "You knew what the question meant," as if I were just arguing because I was annoyed I'd gotten it wrong - which is why I don't actually regret having the argument in front of everyone. ::burnout:: Ironically, he's probably the only TA I ever had whose full name I can still remember.

[Trotsky]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

I remember one time where I did a ChemE problem exactly right methodologically, but about half way through dropped a sign and got the wrong answer.  I got 6 out of 10 on the quiz.  I went to the professor and asked "I showed I knew how to do the work, but just made a calculational error.  Shouldn't I get credit for knowing how to solve the problem?"  His response was "If you do that in the real world, your plant won't work."

It's something I never forgot and taught to the junior engineers I worked with.

In one of my two Physics classes, I was marked wrong on a quiz question and ended up arguing about it with the TA in front of the class. The problem was concerned with Relativity, or Doppler shift, or something related (give me a break, I was an English major and it was 30 years ago). So because the question referred to the relevant stationary object as "an observer," I took that to mean a human being, which is three-dimensional - and if that were accurate, my answer to the question would have been correct. But the TA insisted that everybody else knew he meant a single point in space. Why on earth would you call a single point in space "an observer"?? If that's standard for that area of the science, fine, but this was a class for non-majors, and he should have worded the question more clearly. He ended up snottily declaring, "You knew what the question meant," as if I were just arguing because I was annoyed I'd gotten it wrong - which is why I don't actually regret having the argument in front of everyone. ::burnout:: Ironically, he's probably the only TA I ever had whose full name I can still remember.

You should have argued that "stationary point" is arbitrary because all points are relative to one another and there is no objective frame of reference.  Had I been your TA I'd have given you the grade and told you to sit down and stop being a dick.  :-}

Oh, shit, it wasn't me, was it?

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

I remember one time where I did a ChemE problem exactly right methodologically, but about half way through dropped a sign and got the wrong answer.  I got 6 out of 10 on the quiz.  I went to the professor and asked "I showed I knew how to do the work, but just made a calculational error.  Shouldn't I get credit for knowing how to solve the problem?"  His response was "If you do that in the real world, your plant won't work."

Thorpe or Harriott?

Uncle Ray (Thorpe)

[marty]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

I remember one time where I did a ChemE problem exactly right methodologically, but about half way through dropped a sign and got the wrong answer.  I got 6 out of 10 on the quiz.  I went to the professor and asked "I showed I knew how to do the work, but just made a calculational error.  Shouldn't I get credit for knowing how to solve the problem?"  His response was "If you do that in the real world, your plant won't work."

Thorpe or Harriott?

Uncle Ray (Thorpe)

....who was also the professor whose wife threw the papers on the stairs to grade them!
::banana::

[marty]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

I remember one time where I did a ChemE problem exactly right methodologically, but about half way through dropped a sign and got the wrong answer.  I got 6 out of 10 on the quiz.  I went to the professor and asked "I showed I knew how to do the work, but just made a calculational error.  Shouldn't I get credit for knowing how to solve the problem?"  His response was "If you do that in the real world, your plant won't work."

Thorpe or Harriott?

Uncle Ray (Thorpe)

... who was also the professor whose wife threw the papers down the stairs to grade them.
::banana::

P.S. Emerson Fittipaldi or whichever Formula One hero for extra credit.

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

Sorry, after 40 years of teaching Cornell undergrads I have to disagree.  And it isn't the students with poor grades who cause problems these days.  It is the students who get a B+ instead of an A.  "I worked really hard."  "I studied all night."  And sometimes "I always go to class."  But whatever the lead in, the next question is..."So why didn't I get an A?"  I have always tried to be tactful in how I phrase the answer but basically it is "Your answer was wrong" or"You don't really understand the material so why should you get an A."  Or "Um, where on the syllabus does it say I aware an A for effort?"  It is disturbing how many undergrads care more about what grade they get than what the actually learn.  And privacy laws prevent us from giving them examples of all the famous and/or successful people who were B+ students...or worse.

I remember one time where I did a ChemE problem exactly right methodologically, but about half way through dropped a sign and got the wrong answer.  I got 6 out of 10 on the quiz.  I went to the professor and asked "I showed I knew how to do the work, but just made a calculational error.  Shouldn't I get credit for knowing how to solve the problem?"  His response was "If you do that in the real world, your plant won't work."

Thorpe or Harriott?

Uncle Ray (Thorpe)

....who was also the professor whose wife threw the papers on the stairs to grade them!
::banana::

I THOUGHT that sounded familiar!

I still remember his mnemonic for the phase rule:  Remember the Varna Police Department.  Police Force = Chief + 2  (P + F = C + 2)