A professor from The University of Akron, in Ohio, who planned on bumping up the grades of his female students was stopped this week after the university’s officials intervened.
Liping Liu, an information systems analysis and design teacher sent an email to his students stating the three groups of people that may have their grades boosted.
The three groups stated were female students, students who demonstrated higher performances in exams than their calculated performances, and students who attended class but missed reporting attendance.
In the email, Liu claimed it was part of a “national movement to encourage female students to go to information sciences.” However, university officials stepped in.
However, it appears that was not Liu’s only motivation.
In an email, he told The College Fix that he was attempting to boost the grades of female students because in his classes of 20 to 30 students, only one or two of them were female and they aren’t doing well, saying they may have to repeat the courses or leave the program. He said the grade boosts were part of his own “experiments to understand the attitudinal and motivational factors of female students that explain their success and failures,” Liu said.
The university’s Executive Vice President, Rex Ramsier, praised Liu for his enthusiasm in getting more women into the informational sciences field, but criticized his approach, deeming it “clearly unacceptable.”
Ramsier added that The University of Akron is committed to laws and its policies that do not discriminate on the basis of sex. The professor is adhering to the university’s standards after he had been advised to stay within its policies.
Students who were interviewed expressed mixed opinions.
One student described the professor’s intention as “noble” because he wanted to get more women into his field but that his approach was unacceptable. Another student made similar remarks, namely that more women should be in the STEM fields, but that his approach was not the right way to go about it.
Michalla Gordon, a nursing student from The University of Akron, said, “Everything should be based on hard work, and I don’t think that women need a crutch to get into science.”
