Professor here, with a viewpoint that seems to be underrepresented. The kind of thing discussed in this article would absolutely not fly at my university. We a

Professor here, with a viewpoint that seems to be underrepresented. The kind of thing discussed in this article would absolutely not fly at my university. We are expected to formulate standards for grading, inform the students of these standards, and follow them when assigning grades. A relatively standard term for grading in ways that does not follow announced standards is "capricious grading". And many -- perhaps most, perhaps all -- U.S. universities now have official policies against it. Egregious violations of such policies would be grounds for various kinds of penalities/punishment. That is not to say that cheating is irrelevant. For example, every syllabus I write contains the line, "Academic dishonesty will not be tolerated, and will be dealt with according to [my school's] procedures." In another comment, user hn_ says, "A syllabus is not a contract." This is correct. That means that a syllabus is not enforceable in a court of law. However, university policy may still dictate that a syllabus is an ironclad statement of how the course will be conducted. So, for example, I have seen a student make a complaint against a professor and take it up the chain of command. The first question asked by each of the administrators the complaint came to was, "What does the syllabus say?" If the professor is found to be acting in accordance with the course syllabus, then the student has a much harder time making a case -- at the very least. A related issue, which seems to be an important one in the case mentioned in the article, is that grading standards are generally to be applied individually. There is such a thing as group work, of course; in such cases we make it clear that each person in the group is judged by the performance of the group as a whole. Now, I don't know how accurately this article is representing the actual events that occurred. But if Horwitz really is assigning individual grades based on a nebulous judgement about the class as a whole, then I would say he is clearly guilty of a violation of professional ethics. What "the class deserves" is simply irrelevant to an individual's grade.