Final Grade of a 'C' Prompts Personal Injury Lawsuit
While in college, I studied hard and generally received good grades, which I felt I had earned. I was very proud about maintaining a high grade point average. I do remember being very bitter once when I got a 'B' on a project that I felt had definitely deserved an 'A' on, but I didn't make a federal case out of it. Perhaps if it had been a 'C,' I would have wanted to, but probably not. Generally in school, you do your work and take the grades that you get, whether you agree with your professor or not. That's how it works. Generally.
Brian Marquis, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was so devastated when he received a 'C' in his political philosophy class when he had thought that he had earned an 'A-minus' that he decided to sue the school.
The political philosophy class that Marquis was enrolled in was graded on a curve by a teaching assistant. The curve transformed Marquis' 'A-minus' into a 'C'.
In January, Marquis filed a 15-count personal injury lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Springfield alleging that the university had violated his civil rights and contractual rights, and intentionally inflicted "emotional distress" on him. Drama, anyone?
Marquis is a 51-year-old paralegal who is studying at the University of Massachusetts for bachelor's degrees in legal studies and sociology.
"This is not something I relish," Marquis said. "This is not an issue of me walking into court and saying, "I don't like the way this professor grades this paper," which is purely their academic prerogative. This is an issue where the empirical data was quite clear and convincing to any reasonable mind that my performance was well within a higher range."
Marquis says that he is worried that the 'C' might lower his grade-point average and make him less attractive to a prospective law school. His lawsuit says that the grading has transformed his transcript into a "dismal record of non-achievement." Marquis enrolled at UMass-Amherst in spring 2006, and says that he has about a B-plus average overall.
District Court Judge Michael A. Ponsor disagreed with Marquis. After a brief hearing with Marquis and a lawyer for UMass at Amhurst, Ponsor dismissed the lawsuit against the university. However, Marquis is still not willing to let it go. He says that he is considering appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
At the center of Marquis' lawsuit and grief is Jeremy Cushing, a teaching assistant and a graduate student in philosophy. Cushing is about half Marquis' age.
Marquis says that at the start of the semester, Cushing explained how the course would be graded. Cushing told the class that there would be three major tests, each carrying a weight of 25 percent of the final grade. The students would be required to write four papers, with each paper worth 5 percent of the final grade. Class participation would account for the final 5 percent of the grade. A curve scale was not mentioned.
Based on the formula laid out by Cushing, Marquis calculated that his final grade was 92.5 percent, which should have been an 'A-minus', but when he checked his grade online he found that he had gotten a 'C' in the class.
Marquis e-mailed Cushing to complain about his final grade in the class. Cushing replied and explained to him that he had graded more strictly on the third major test because the students had already had a full semester to learn how to write correctly for a philosophy class. Cushing explained that as a result, Marquis had actually earned a final grade of 84 percent. Cushing said that the students' numerical scores seemed too high to him so he graded everyone on a curve before assigning a letter grade. He said that he thought a 'C' was a good reflection of Marquis' work in the class.
Fair or not, Catharine Porter, the UMass-Amherst ombudsman, who was also a defendant in the lawsuit said, "If every student that didn't like his or her grade started to do this, we'd have to hire, I don't know, 25,000 attorneys."
Marquis had emailed Porter after hearing back from Cushing about his grade. She urged him to accept the grade and move on. Less than three weeks later, Marquis filed his lawsuit.
At the brief hearing, Peter Michelson, a lawyer for the university, told the judge that Marquis' suit was, more or less, baloney. He posed the question, "Does the court really want to put itself in the business of reviewing, under some constitutional or federal statutory doctrine, the propriety of the grades which a student has received?"
Judge Ponsor's dismissal of the personal injury lawsuit gives a fairly decisive answer to that question.