A male friend of mine took a Women's Studies class and got a C, but well. Was the female professor sexist?

A guy I know that took Women's Studies received a C by the professor, but averaged out, he scored a high B.





The class was a combination of 4 exams -- 3 regular exams and 1 final. He showed me all of his graded tests and essays. He got a B on the first exam, an A on the second exam, an A on the third exam, and an A on the final. There was one essay. He got a B. A small percentage of the grade was class participation. He said he was one of the top 3 in the class that spoke and discussed (two girls and himself).





Do female professors generally discriminate against men and grade them harder, due to bitterness and other personal issues these female professors have?

A male friend of mine took a Women's Studies class and got a C, but well. Was the female professor sexist?
You need to look at the syllabus and see how the points are divided. Syllabuses are generally required to explain the grading/point system.





There may be papers he's not showing you - for example, it's very unusual for a class to consist of ONE essay. Did he not do the others? Did he not show them to you because he did not do well?





IF he can show that he did earn a better grade based on the instructor's grading system, then he should talk to the head of the department. That's the next step in the chain of command.
Reply:Well what does he think and has he talked to the teach


if he hasn't he should but do it in a very kind way and best of luck... also if there was alot of points on participation that could be part of it too... other wise I think that the proffesor is sexist... also be sure that your friend isn't trying to make you to side with you either
Reply:I dont think so...I mean it depends on the professor. I think their main goal is to educate men not discriminate, but everyoneis different
Reply:Has he considered talking to her about it?





It sounds like he has the documentation to make his case. It's been my experience that most professors are fair. It could also be that she made an honest mistake.





Even if he doesn't get his grade changed, he can know for certain why he received a "C".
Reply:It is generally not true.Teachers are just and fair.
Reply:Since he was a friend of yours, he's lucky to have gotten a C. Based on the questions you ask, I wouldn't expect a friend of yours to get a D, so a C sounds incredible..





Ok: I treat you like your question:





You assume the worst about a female professor.


So I assumed the worst about you.





You assume the female professor is discriminating against men, is grading men more harshly, and is acting unethically.


So I assume you're discriminating against females, reacting harshly to women, and acting unethically.





You're assuming female professors are discriminating against men because they are bitter and have "personal issues".


So I assume you're bashing female instructors because of your bitterness and "personal issues".





As to your question's answer:


Based on the incomplete information provided, there is no way to know if the professor was in error or if your "friend" was unable to read the syllabus, was partially incompetent, and deserved a C.





Edit: Here's an "intellectual" response you made recently, don't know why anyone would think you were hostile towards feminists or had a "hostile anti-woman agenda": "He's also alluding to the fact/stereotype that many feminists are indeed butch lesbians that are jealous of men, with anti-male agenda".
Reply:Professors don't rate essays or exams, TAs do. Women's Studies classes usually have tutorials.





Also, they never give you the grades for your final. The final is usually worth about 30-40% of your grade. The final can make or break you.
Reply:Actually, there is a statistic that shows the opposite... I only know because my technical writing instructor (female) brought it up. When she reviewed her grade disbursement over her career, she found that she gave higher grades to the males. Something that even surprised her!





now let me see if I can find a link to prove this......





He does seem like he got a lower grade then expected, I have had to speak with a few profs on account of a mistake on the grading, they are human too! Tell your friend to discuss this with his instructor, don't be shy!!!
Reply:It's difficult to say whether your friend was discriminated against, because we do not know the grade breakdown of the class, were there reports? class projects? did the professor grade homework? (though most dont, some actually do) Also a big trend I've noticed lately is prof's including attendence as a large part of the students grade, so many students used to just read the material and only show up for "important" class periods. Obviously if the teacher is a lecturing teacher, this can be irritating, so they grade heavy on not only class participation but also attendence/tardiness.





Considering the evidence you provided, it is possible, however, and this is why institutions offer un-fair grade challanges. Not sure how it would work at your friend's school exactly but it's usually a series of forms to be filled out, the department head will review the prof's decision and make a final decision, if the student is still unsatisfied with that, the student can appeal the grade to the dean, and finally the president of the college.





If your friend thinks he was treated unfairly, the worst thing he can do is sit on his hands in this. If in fact the teacher is discriminating, it should be brought to the higher-ups attention, so that she can be dealt with. IF however the grade was fair? at least the appeal will be able to give your friend a better idea of why it was fair.





Either way tell him to file it, doesn't hurt the student.
Reply:Not all female professors are feminists, though in the humanities, most are. And in the humanities, not all of them are as ardent about feminism as the ones who teach feminism. You broaden your question too much when you ask if "female professors generally discriminate".


___And even some ardent feminists are honest and have enough intellectual integrity to be uncomfortable with some of the absurdities that occur in feminist literature and to entertain disagreements with dignity, etc.


___You should understand that the girls of the past four decades have been broadly exposed to a doctrine that has great appeal for females going through the personal struggles that afflict all adolescents. It is a doctrine of uterocentric indulgence that allows them to blame their hardships on others, and to "belong" to a wider movement that tells them at least by implication (and sometimes explicitly) that merely in virtue of the accident of female birth, they are free of moral responsibility for anything evil in the world, which is said to be a "patriarchy".


___At the same time, many feminists claim that men couldn't have built civilization without women's contributions, and one often hears the old saw about there being a great woman behind every great man. In this and in many other ways, feminists slice the cake of collective moral responsibility so that the evil devolves onto males, and the good goes to females.


___But when it comes to assessing the distribution of power, feminists exclude from consideration those elements of influence that underpin the above claims of having responsibility for the good that men do. The criteria they employ for equality are conveniently limited to measures of public, material, manifest power where testosterone confers an advantage on men.


___(Testosterone, inter alia, makes men's internal emotional experience generally more brutalizing and explosive for them than for women, and so men tend to avoid living in touch with their emotions more than women. Instead, men are driven towards envisioning the world in more abstract, and less here-and-now terms, and this is more effectual in constructing long-term visions, and in managing risk without the interference of emotions. The downside of the testosterone thing is the crimes of passion comitted by those who don't learn to manage their explosive emotions, and on the other hand, the overextension into abstract and otherworldly emphases, as exemplified in late medieval society, when the here-and-now was so denigrated as a cultural value, that people couldn't live those kinds of lives any longer. And the intellectual life of the times had milked all the value that could be milked out of the abstract and otherworldly domains without revisiting the sensual, material domains, and it became arid and fruitless until the Renaissance.)


___Feminists have good grounds to criticize the phallocentric conceptions of life, but they've been aiming at a moving historical target. The feminizing of Western thought goes back to the Renaissance, though initially, this feminizing was implicit, and was a matter of presuppositional themes that filled in the glaring deficits of medieval and ancient phallocentrism. In the Renaissance, Western thought moved toward an increasing emphasis on the domain of immediate (not abstract/otherworldly) experience, that is, in the direction of materialism, sensualism, empiricism, emotivism, and political pragmatism.


___Now if you look at feminism's criteria of equality, they demonstrate a materialist focus, while many of its explicit doctrines concern emotive/extra-rational truth, sexual freedom, and consumer protection. It is the thematic correlations between Rennaisance trends and feminist theory and practices that leads to the characterization of modernity as a feminizing trend in Western thought. And this trend, despite some fits and starts, has continued pretty much steadily in the same conventional direction that is called "progressive" for 600 years. (But its leading to skepticism and paradox was unexpected, and conventional thinking has called this outcome "post-" modern, though it is merely the fruition of the modern intellectual trend, past the point of diminishing returns.)


___The early stages can be said not to "count", since they were filling in the deficiencies of phallocentrism, but one might expect some sort of slowing of the trend as it approached balance. But in uterocentrism, as had happened with phallocentrism, the solidifying of the feminine perspective led to an exclusion of the annoying conflicts that came from a fuller apprehension of the world and the human condition, as manifest in phallocentric perspectives. Both phallocentric and uterocentric perspectives have validity, but they are, when purified, incomensurable and incompatible, and so the human intolerance of incompatibility leads a dominant paradigm to exclude the deeper paradoxes it finds troubling. And when a group of like-minded elites gain control of a discourse, they usually succumb to the temptation to purify the methodology of conventional wisdom to make it more conforming to their prejudices. This holds for both uterocentrism and phallocentrism.


___The feminizing of Western thought becomes explicit only in the past 200 years, after the underlying changes in intellectual and artistic trends paved the way.


___All of this has great persuasive force for adolescent girls (and it should be remembered that adolescence in developed nations commonly continues well into one's 30s). Morally, feminism provides a "have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too" escape from the harder edges of moral responsibility, and intellectually, it has the force of conventional wisdom and the exclusion of intellectual tough patches. Similar intellectual dynamics occur in scientific communities (cf. Thomas Kuhn, "S.of S.R."). It all seems to be so "intuitively right" and to make such "perfect sense". This is how conventional wisdom comes to persist, and to exclude what its presuppositions render counterintuitive or anomalous.


___But like any other stale conventional paradigm, when it begins to get extreme, the absence of a newer, more comprehensive perspective and set of assumptions leads its adherents to grasp ever more desperately to the prevailing ones, and to engage in ever-more extreme theoretical fudges and refusals to consider alternatives, despite mounting evidence the paradigm's flaws.


___So if you want to go into a women's studies class, you should remain somewhat philosophical about it, and don't concern yourself with petty things like grades. Mary Daly at Boston College excluded males from her classroom because they "interfere with what we're trying to accomplish". Feminism is a bit of a cult, and it depends on avoiding the challenges to feminine solipsism that would come from exposure to those contributions of phallocentric thought that remain valid. As with phallocentrism, uterocentrism gets strength from the conjunction of presuppositions that are intuitively comfortable for females and explicit doctrines and programs that foster immediage psychological, material, and sensual gratifications. So if you or a friend march into a women's studies classroom thinking that simply pointing out this or that factual refutation of some feminist dogma will have much effect, all that willl be accomplished is disruption, and for that you would be lucky to escape a bad grade.


___It may seem that one OUGHT to be able to point out inconsistencies in the doctrine being taught in a classroom iwthout censure, but these issues run very deep, and it might help to remember that the shoe was on the other foot for many centuries.


___So don't take a women's studies course for the grade, or if you expect to correct their illusions. Take it for your own perspective, and to learn how human thinking in general is subject to solipsism and psychological self-protection, and come out a bit wiser and more circumspect. Be patient and respectful, even if it gets extremely frustrating. Look for the deeper themes, and be patient. Feminism isn't going to go away overnight, and the current political situation should show that snippy nit-picking and intellectual laziness aren't going to be adequate to correct the inadequacies of conventional wisdom.
Reply:They generally don't, but you can contest the issue.
Reply:The grade doesn't seem fair...but was there an attendance rule as well? A few classes I took in college had the rule that if you missed more than three classes, you were bumped down a letter grade. If not, then I would take it up with the prof, I had a friend who fought for their grade and got it. Also, is he sure the prof knew his name? In the college setting, the prof could have thought he was someone else and did not give him participation points.





I only took 2 women's studies classes, and while the profs were a bit hippish and had interesting perspectives on men, I don't think that they would give a guy a lower grade because of his gender...