Forty-four million views later, the University of Oklahoma has advised student Samantha Fulnecky that the zero her paper received won’t be factored into her final course grade.
While it’s good that the school won’t hold that zero against her, she deserves a grade — an honest, objective grade — for her work.
Fulnecky did submit a paper, contrary to what is implied by the zero. She did indeed turn in an essay on the topic of “gender, peer relations and mental health” that her class was assigned.
Perhaps the word “gender” has given you the clue. You guessed it: she took the wrong view.
The Washington Post reports that her essay “rejected the concept of multiple genders and cited the Bible to support her view that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes. ‘Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,’ Fulnecky wrote.”
Turning Point USA, which collected 44,000,000 views for its post about the controversy, has also posted the essay itself.
Whether Samantha Fulnecky’s work precisely follows the requirements of the assignment I don’t know; these have not been posted as well. Though not deathless prose, the essay is intelligible and on the assigned topic, if perhaps annoying to those who, like the transgender professor who assigned the paper, disagree with its Biblical perspective and non-novel view of male and female.
In other words, it’s not nothing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Zero/Not-Zero”
The guidelines have been posted; they were not very thoughtful; Ms Fulnecky’s rather childish essay conformed to those rather thoughtless guidelines, and then the instructor tried to impose better guidelines ex post facto.
The department chairperson, the dean, the provost, and the president should apologize to the taxpayers for offering a course at their expense that did not develop or test human capital of any sort.
She still gets penalized, because the paper was not zero caliber work, and its exclusion removed the possibility of an earned higher grade from being considered as part of her grade. Just because she threatened the perverse world view of her professor doesn’t legitimize that outcome.
The university is enforcing the religion of human secularism. Which is fine if they so choose, but not with the support of federal funds. They should forfeit federal guarantees for student loans and federal education grants and subsidies, if they want to demand kowtowing to their private religion.
Maybe the professor should get a Zero
Thanks, I appreciated the link to her essay. I cannot evaluate it in terms of whatever academic criteria the professor specified in the assignment, but I cannot imagine a set of criteria which would have resulted in a zero.