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>When Watson began his campaign in early 1982, he was aware of ratification by only six states and he erroneously believed that Virginia's 1791 approval was the
by koboll 7y ago
>When Watson began his campaign in early 1982, he was aware of ratification by only six states and he erroneously believed that Virginia's 1791 approval was the last action taken by the states. He discovered in 1983 that Ohio had approved it in 1873 as a means of protest against the Salary Grab Act and learned in 1984 that Wyoming had done the same 6 years earlier in 1978, as a protest against a 1977 congressional pay raise. Further, Watson did not know, until 1997, well after the amendment's adoption, that Kentucky had ratified the amendment in 1792. Neither did Kentucky lawmakers themselves — in Watson's desire for a 50-state sweep, the Kentucky General Assembly post-ratified the amendment in 1996 (Senate Joint Resolution No. 50), at Watson's request, likewise unaware that the task had already been attended to some 204 years earlier.
>In 2016, Zach Elkins, a professor in the UT Department of Government, became interested in Watson's story and began to document its origins. He tracked down Sharon Waite, who had left academia in the 1980s to work on her family's citrus farm. Elkins suggested to Waite that they change Watson's grade. In 2017, Elkins submitted a grade change form with Waite's signature and a grade change to "A+". In an interview with NPR, Waite stated, "Goodness, he certainly proved he knew how to work the Constitution and what it meant and how to be politically active, [...] So, yes, I think he deserves an A after that effort — A-plus!" The registrar approved a grade change to "A", because the university does not give grades higher than "A".
How has this not yet been made into a comedy?
- theturtletalks 7y agoI’ve never been more proud of my alma mater.
- nojvek 7y agoWould love to see this as a movie. Or at-least a book
- shadowoflight 7y ago>The registrar approved a grade change to "A", because the university does not give grades higher than "A". It’s hilarious to me that the bureaucracy of this university couldn’t allow even a single grade above an A in this exceptional circumstance - I wonder if it actually came down to some hard limit in their grade keeping system, or if some grumpy recordskeeper just said, “Nope, this is how we’ve always done things, so this is how we will always do things.”
- watwut 7y agoIn all seriousness, the profs cant just invent grades that don't exist. Verbal "awesome work from X everybody read it" is for that purpose. This is not some kind of overreach of bureaucracy.
- crawfordcomeaux 7y agoIn all seriousness, the profs can choose to do what they want and the system most certainly can choose to allow it or not. This is absolutely an example of rigid bureaucracy at work. Also, you now are eligible for grade changes in past English classes because you used the word "can't" figuratively to describe a literal situation. Whether the grade changes occur and if they go up or down is up to the systems maintaining the grades and the teachers.
- watwut 7y agoNext level grade inflation "A+++", "totally awesome A", "A totally even more awesome then A+++:. In all seriousness, this is not rigid bureaucracy preventing something that would be useful. Just because prof have such an emotional reaction to someones unusual effort does not mean new grade has a reason to exist.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoI guess it depends on the grading system doesn't it? I mean, if the top mark is essentially 100% to mean "there's nothing that reasonably could have been done to improve it" and A is defined as 80-100, then you can't to better than A. Or if the top mark is 1.0 and the worst passing mark is 4.0, and A means 1.0, then you can't do better than A. They already went way outside, above and beyond anything I could've imagined. How do you change a grade decades after the course? Surely they're locked down soon after. To me, just going off and making it an A (rather than the professor just saying "well I've got egg on my face don't I?") is already incredible and a generous deviation from the bureaucracy.
- crawfordcomeaux 7y ago