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Bluntly, it is a crap essay, poorly written and is nothing but her expressing her Biblical views. It is not college-level writing.
Did it deserve a 0? Probably not. It's... grammatical and uses complete sentences and is sorta on topic inasmuch as the student is "reacting" to the article as directed. But I think giving it a C would be extremely generous even by modern grade-inflationary standards.
I have no doubt the trans prof threw a fit upon reading it. But it's very unfortunate that righties have no better material to rally around. A smarter student could have written a critical essay that would have been harder to justify giving a 0, but Fulnecky frankly does not seem very bright in her interviews.
I think it was probably written to get the Oklahoma congress to take up the problem of increasing supervision on state universities to 'prevent anti-Christian discrimination' and demonstrates the minimum amount of effort needed for that purpose.
A lot of people seem to think this was a trap that the trans instructor stepped into. I'm skeptical of these sorts of political chess game theories. Unless evidence comes to light that Fulnecky was in fact conspiring with someone or put up to it by TPUSA or some other organization, it seems unlikely to me that she's smart or strategic enough to have planned this out. I think the more likely explanation is that she decided to tell this trans instructor what's what according to the Bible, was outraged at receiving a zero, and then someone suggested to her that she should file a complaint. It attracted buzz because of CW and here we are.
Righties have rallied around a dim but photogenic Bible Karen, and the trans instructor predictably threw a shitfit when challenged. Both sides following a very stupid and tiresome script. An early version of ChatGPT could have generated this plot.
The TA and professor also appear dimwitted. Just three dumb people arguing but one of them is attractive so…
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Uh, didn't the local chapter of the TPUSA play a starring role?
Yes, but were they involved beforehand or did they hear about Fulnecky's complaint afterwards? Or did she go to them when she got a zero?
There is the version where TPUSA put her up to it, the way a lot of organizations go looking for sympathetic cases and even stage them. There is the version where Fulnecky just wrote a Bible paper in her class, got a zero, and went looking for sympathy and found TPUSA. And there is the version where TPUSA put out some kind of mailer ("Are you a Christian student being persecuted by your woke professors?") and Fulnecky was inspired to see if she could provoke her instructor into "persecuting" her. I am inclined to think it's probably #2, and would be surprised if Fulnecky came up with #3 all on her own.
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I see a lot of people, myself included, thinking that it's very unlikely that this instructor in particular typically assigns zeroes to bad essays from their students. If we are correct that this is an unusual deviation from their standard grading practices, the question is why, and we think we have a pretty good idea of the answer. I'd be surprised if you think either of those assumptions are unfounded, but am prepared to be corrected. This seems very likely to me to be an open-and-shut case of unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religion by a state employee, and I see zero argument for why it should not be pursued more or less exactly as it has been. The ACLU made its name off similar cases; were they wrong to do so?
The far more marginal question is whether this was a cunning plan on the part of the student. I would not bet on that question either way; I've seen lots of cases where people did things like this intentionally, and in fact setting these kinds of traps appears to have been a standard part of civil rights litigation since the invention of the discipline. On the other hand, average people are of average intelligence, and organic tribal friction is going to be orders of magnitude more common than cunning ploys.
If you disagree that this is likely to be a case of unconstitutional discrimination, I'd be interested to hear your reasoning. Do you think this instructor typically hands out zeroes? If not, do you think this essay in particular deserved a zero for reasons other than its viewpoint? Or if it was discrimination, do you think the student should have accepted their zero quietly, or else complained through the university system first? Why should Righties not rally around this dim but photogenic Bible Karen? What is objectionable about them doing so?
But what I see in the other side of the conversation is people frowning over these events, and then explaining their frowning with justifications that make zero sense, based entirely on transparently-isolated demands for rigor. This is not surprising, we are all tribal down to the white of our bones and this is what tribals do. I will certainly say that I do not consider it tiresome: it seems overwhelmingly likely that this is the law working exactly the way it's supposed to.
Ackshually... I wonder. It might be viewpoint discrimination, but is it religious viewpoint discrimination? If a student submitted an essay equally critical of trans stuff, but based it on appeals to evolutionary psychology and HBD and inescapable biological realities, I imagine they would get treated similarly.
So it's not clear that religion is the motivating factor here. I don't know if whatever rules there are against religious discrimination would extend to atheistic holders of naughty opinions, but I suspect they wouldn't.
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I already said the essay probably doesn't deserve a 0 (though it certainly deserves a D at best). I agree the instructor probably gave her a 0 out of pique/personal offense.
Does it meet the legal definition of "religious discrimination"? I doubt it, but determining Constitutionality is more complicated than "Does the instructor dislike Christians?" or "Did other students who wrote crappy essays get zeroes?" That said, you don't really care much what courts and the law says nowadays, do you?
Was it actually religious discrimination, in the sense that the instructor was motivated by animosity for the student's Christian beliefs, as opposed to just being outraged at the student's opinions? (Throwing words like "demonic" doesn't exactly help Fulnecky's case.) I am only slightly more sympathetic to Fulnecky than I would be to a student writing a creationist paper in a science class. Slightly more sympathetic because I actually believe in evolution and I don't believe in "multiple (sic) genders," but I am unmoved by Biblical arguments in either case.
That said, what should Fulnecky have done? Well, protesting low grades is a time-honored tradition, and nowadays every student thinks they should get an A and protests if they don't. If in fact zeroes are uncommon in this class, and especially if she was the only student to receive a zero, I'd definitely agree she was treated unfairly. Does that mean Christians are being persecuted in this class? Eh- did anyone else write such a stupid essay? Would someone writing a paper that says "Actually, there are only two genders and trans people are gross and delusional" without involving religious arguments get a better grade?
I don't really "object" to righties defending her, per se, but I think I made my position pretty clear. She wrote a bad, dumb essay. The instructor reacted badly and is probably a fool. In a sane and reasonable world (bitter laughter), they'd have had a private discussion, maybe involved the department chair, and agreed she deserved something more than a 0, or been given an opportunity to revise. Instead, we are in our world, so a stupid essay in a stupid class about a stupid subject with stupid people is a national news story.
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To my mind, the possible reason starts with the fact that there are different types of shitty essay that may be equally shitty in terms of their writing quality, structure, and reasoning, but that are different in terms of what they herald about what's next for the student. This essay would likely make me as a professor think, "Oh dear, they so misunderstand what we do here that they are unlikely to be able to get anything out of this course. It seems probably they cannot engage with psychology as it is studied." A different, equally shitty essay, perhaps a non-religious-fundamentalist one – but not necessarily – might make me think, "Okay, this is terrible work, but perhaps with time this student is open to being shepherded through to a likely still bad but passing grade." The latter type of essay might simply contain less evidence of close mindedness.
Now is a grade the right language to communicate a message like this to the student? No. A conversation this delicate should be done separately. Nonetheless I sympathise with the professor, and find the idea that the low mark was necessarily about the specifically religious nature of this student's dogmatism to be unproven.
It would by psychology throwing stones. Gender theory is religious belief.
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Is there a canon of things Psychology students are expected to know? Or is it just people's personal opinions and models all the way down?
My impression of Psychology is that it's more like Education than it is Psychiatry. Like in Education, the professor apparently thought it reasonable to ask students for their own personal reactions to an article, rather than a summary, or how someone might use the information in a clinical setting, or (heaven forbid!) a test where they had to reproduce some of the findings from memory. Like in Education, there seem to be a number of different frameworks, and someone can talk about Freud or Jung or Pieget or someone who once did a study with 40 boys, some of whom were less gender conforming according to surveys than others, or Rat Park or whatever, there doesn't seem to be a specific body of knowledge that's expected to be learned.
In Education, some professors want students to say that they will put aside merely teaching the standard Rs in favor of spending more time and energy on Radicalization, whereas other professors think that is a bad idea and it's a red flag if students say they will focus more on Radicalization than on 'Rithmetic. But they don't want to cause a headache for themselves, and give everyone a passing grade on personal reflection essays, no matter what they say.
Maybe I'm wrong, and there are more concrete and agreed upon areas of Psychology, but choosing a mediocre paper about an extremely contested culture war topic, asking for a student to react to it, and then punishing her for writing out her actual reaction, doesn't suggest so.
Probably girls like Samantha study Psychology at the state university so they can find a husband and become a Christian women's counselor, endorsed by the pastor's wife. This is a silly state of affairs, but I also went to Baptist Women's Group at my state college, and it is how things are. Since the TA was punished by the university and legislature, not the student, it's apparent that they were the one who misunderstood their role.
Psychology students are expected to know anything?
If there's anything that should be canon in Psychology, it would be the subfield of IQ and psychometrics due its reproducibility, reliability, and predictive power. It's basically the only area of Psychology that has been immune to the replication crisis. Yet, instead of being celebrated like a crown jewel and shouted from the hilltops, it's treated like a red-headed step child due it being unflattering to low achievement minorities and ruining people's sense of Just World egalitarianism.
So instead we get stuff like implicit bias, stereotype threat, priming, and "big, fun things" such as power poses signal-boosted and propagandized.
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I think you overestimate the other essays
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It isn't, or it shouldn't be?
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I feel like it exposes what I've always thought is a flaw in the main US grading system. Officially, anything between 0 and ~60 (depending on the curve) is an F. The best you could possibly do is a 100% A+, unless they want to give extra credit. a 60% is a terrible grade, but it still at least gives you the chance to come back and pass the class. A zero pretty much sinks your grade for the entire class. Giving her a zero here means, not only was her essay bad, it was so bad that she's probably going to flunk the rest of the class no matter how hard she works, unless she begs and grovels for extra credit. There's a bigger range between a zero and a 60% F, then there is between a 60% F and a 100% A+. I just feel like that selects for the wrong incentives.
There are ways to get around this. For example, when I was in school, there was a difference between a Z (0%) given out for no work turned in and an F (50%) given out for shitty work. Likewise, when I was teaching, the head of my department told me that if he saw a student was trying he would give them a high F (e.g. 59%) so that it would only take a little bit more work to pass.
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That depends on how much the essay is worth towards the overall grade. It looks like a fairly trivial assignment; if it's worth 25% of the overall grade, that must be a pretty worthless class (which is entirely possible).
Yeah I'm just assuming this is a typical college class where you only write a handful of essays so each one is worth a lot. But the problem starts even with small assignments- you get one zero and you need 10 perfect grades to make up for it.
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