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Notes -
There was a shooting at Brown University yesterday. Two people were killed. This is of course a tragedy, the kind of tragedy that has been well-litigated both here and everywhere else on the internet.
Brown decided to follow this up with another tragedy: canceling all outstanding exams and operations for the remainder of 2025.
One of the issues with our education system is that it is fundamentally unserious. Final exams are, or ought to be, a big fucking deal. Ten thousand of our supposedly best and brightest students will now pass an entire semester of advanced classes without a comprehensive examination of their skills and capabilities. Medical classes. I hope the physician you visit to get your unusually yellow skin checked out didn't take hepatology at Brown University in Fall 2025.
University Administrator Try-Not-to-Find-An-Excuse-to-Avoid-Upholding-Academic-Standards Challenge: Impossible
Feature, not a bug for most at Brown.
This is like an inverse-9/11 for those at Brown who weren't friends or family with the two deceased and the nine injured (and you know, and the deceased and injured themselves). For students, especially the weaker ones, this means getting past a semester without the toughest stretch of papers, projects, and exams. For academic faculty, this means time and energy that would had been spent teaching, grading, and fending off grade grubbers can now be applied toward research. For administrators, fewer students around means less work to do—plus this is good for Equity, as canceling the semester's remaining papers, projects, and exams means reducing some of the dispersion in grades and graduation rates between Asians, whites, latinos, and blacks that would had otherwise occurred.
The biggest victims (other than the deceased and injured, and their friends and family) are academically strong students in easy/gen pop. courses, who are now deprived of an opportunity to further improve their relative GPA positioning against their peers, as I imagine it'll be likely that (whether by university/school decree or Professorial discretion) everyone just gets 100% for the canceled papers, projects, and exams, especially in easy/gen pop. courses. Or some high X%, where X% can help but not hinder a student's grade in that course.
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