r/MaliciousCompliance • u/DoublePreparation241 • 15d ago
M My professor said follow the formatting rules exactly or lose points, so I did
This was sophomore year, some gen ed English class I only took because I needed the credit. My professor, I will just call him Dr. H, was known across the whole department for being insane about formatting. Not the normal MLA or APA stuff, he had his own extra rules stapled onto the syllabus on top of that. Font, margins, spacing, where the page numbers had to go, all graded completely separate from the actual writing.
About three weeks into the semester someone asked what happens if you do not follow the formatting rules exactly. He said, word for word, because I wrote it down out of spite, that if you follow his instructions exactly as written you get full formatting credit, no exceptions, no partial credit for close enough.
Cool. Noted.
So that weekend I actually read the formatting section of the syllabus line by line instead of skimming it like everyone else did. Two things jumped out. First, it said the title needs to be centered. It never said what the title had to say, just that it had to be centered. Second, it said your name needs to appear in the header. It never said how many times.
For the next essay my title was just the word "Essay," centered, huge font because there was no size limit listed either. My header had my name in it eleven separate times because technically that still satisfies "your name needs to appear in the header." I also put page numbers on every single page, including a blank works cited page that had nothing on it except the number seven.
Turned it in feeling pretty proud of myself honestly.
Got it back and he had docked me formatting points with a note that just said "unprofessional presentation." Next class I raised my hand and asked him to point to the specific rule I had broken. He couldn't, because I hadn't broken a single one, I had just followed them further than anyone expected anyone to. Then I brought up his own quote from a few weeks earlier, in front of the whole room.
He was obviously annoyed but couldn't argue with his own words without looking ridiculous in front of 40 people, so I got the points back. By the next essay the formatting section of the syllabus had basically doubled in length and every loophole I used was individually closed.
10/10 would exploit a poorly written rule again.
TLDR: professor said follow formatting instructions exactly for full credit, I took that way more literally than he expected, he couldn't dock me points without contradicting himself, syllabus got rewritten within a week to patch every hole I found.
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u/arizonaraynebows 15d ago
As a teacher, I hate you. As a general rule-breaker, this is brilliant. I despise these professors who add an abundance of specific random rules for tge sake of being ultra pretentious.
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u/lininop 15d ago
I'm going to have to dock you points. Typo.
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u/antikevinkevinclub 15d ago
I'm going to have to hit you with the Uno reverse card because "Typo." is technically a sentence fragment. Grammar would technically dictate using either an emdash or a colon rather than a period after "points." However since we have collectively decided that emdashes make you look like an LLM despite their accuracy, I would just use a hyphen!
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u/lininop 15d ago
Haha I knew that'd get me. Fair play.
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u/antikevinkevinclub 15d ago
In a thread regarding pedantry, one can only hope that we all collectively attempt to out-pedantic eachother š
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u/paulcager 15d ago
out-pedant*
"Pedantic" is an adjective;"out-" should be followed by a noun or verb.
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u/LordHoughtenWeen 15d ago
I regret to inform you that your semicolon should have been followed by a space.
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u/paulcager 15d ago
You are, of course, completely right. I can't believe I made that mistake and I shall remove myself from polite discourse forthwith.
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u/Durzio 15d ago
MLA already has rules for all these things though. None of the things he listed were "extra" on top of regular ass MLA. Sounds like he was less restrictive than that.
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u/seitung 15d ago
Yeah basic formatting requirements like these are standard in university courses. Insane it certainly is not. Itās an English course. Itās designed for preparing students to follow more stringent formatting requirements like publications and refining their use of language. Those are the skills those required courses teach.
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u/showhorrorshow 15d ago
Yep, basically just "citations" courses. The topic you write about is just the fluff.
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u/spacebunsofsteel 15d ago
Microsoft Word used to have a built in reference formatting feature that worked so well. You could choose your publication type and it would do all the rest. This was around Word 6.0.
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u/Own_Reaction9442 14d ago
Back in the day, you'd just download the LaTeX template for the journal you were submitting to and use that.
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u/SanctionedBaffoonery 15d ago
Can you follow basic-ass rules is such an important part of being a functional member of society, that posts like this kind of annoy me. Yes, there are teachers/professors who take it too far and are sticklers for the least important part of the assignment.
But almost always this is just some immature and contrarian student who's upset that someone had the gall to tell them what to do. These people grow up to become the type of people who sue everyone for everything and make us need pointless legalize warnings on everything.
There are people who use the system to make a more fair society. But then there are people who abuse the system and make it more bureaucratic and litigious.
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u/pavlovselephant 15d ago
Yeah, all OP accomplished was to make the rules even more cumbersome for the next cohort.
And I guarantee that the original rules were as pedantic as they were because some previous twat thought they could fudge the page count with size 25 font or some similar bullshit. (I once had a student "meet" a 15-sentence minimum on an assignment by inserting periods in random spots in what amounted to about 5 actual sentences. Guess what I had to explicitly disallow on the next assignment.)
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u/doppelgaengster 14d ago
Itās the academic version of āwhy is this insanely specific and wildly left-field warning label even a thing??ā on commercial products. Because it didnāt need a warning label until someone had a nutty.
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u/Honest-Resist-7676 15d ago
Yeah, and this dude is adjacent to the guy who goes "aha! Prof doesn't have any rules for formatting. 30pt font, empty sources box! Hehe haha" and gets the rules in the first place.
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u/Careless-Notice-7945 14d ago
Yes I'm not compelled to root for op when their damning accusations include "we needed to center the title"
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
I mean, if you're going to insist on non-syllabus personal rules, and someone actually follows them, maybe take a second look at said rules instead of hating the one person who read and implemented them?
(And maybe learn a lesson about having personal rules which had never been stress-tested or reviewed...)
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u/blahblah19999 15d ago
Sorry, as the next year student that has to read a 3 page rubric on how to format my paper, fuck both these people.
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u/arizonaraynebows 15d ago
Did you even read the whole comment or just the first sentence?
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
If you assumed I was having a go at you personally, instead of just pontificating about the situation, you may have swung and missed a little there.
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u/lankymjc 15d ago
Your use of second-person pronoun made it seem you were specifically talking to the person you replied to.
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u/Umklopp 15d ago
When I was a lab TA, I had to enforce the professors' formatting rules. I was very rigorous about it because in real life, journals will immediately reject your submission for failing to follow formatting requirements. It's a genuine thing to teach STEM kids.
But I also made it very explicit that you could submit a report with no actual content and still earn 15 points for formatting, section headers, etc.
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u/-Casey-Diaz- 15d ago
Both MLA and APA have rules for fonts, margins, spacing, and page numbering. Are you really a teacher?
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u/laxfool10 15d ago
I mean in the work force, documents that you submit have specific format requirements. In academics, the format requirements for grants/fellowships/papers can be up to 2 pages long. The formatting requirements for my dissertation was close to 5 pages. Plus he is teaching them how to change margins, add headers/footers, etc. You would be surprised how many kids today don't know how to change anything other than the font size.
Honestly, the professor should just make a template and just put it up on the class portal. Just put a simple "watermark" to know at just a glance if they used the template or not to make grading the format easier. If no watermark then check if they followed the specified format.
Also as someone who TA'd for classes with 5-10 page technical reports for 100+ student that I had to grade weekly, nothing was worse than getting a paper with abysmal formatting as it makes it harder to read. Margins, headers, font, font size, page numbers, justification, spacing are not that crazy of things to specify as it affects things like readability, ease of grading, and final length/word count.
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u/joalheagney 15d ago
As a fellow teacher, "I'm proud that you developed the critical, creative and technical thinking that this required. I'm just angry that you pulled it on me."
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u/highcoolteacher 15d ago
I love some good malicious compliance from students. Almost as much as I love jump scares and Rick Rolls in project. If a student manages to get me, they get extra points
I would have loved this essay and probably kept it up on my wall as a reminder
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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 15d ago
I don't get this.
I would still dock them. Because why wouldn't I?
Rules - not matter how dumb - have an intent. A purpose. And no rule-set is perfect. This would not make me feel like I got "got". It's not clever. It's fairly braindead. It's the Air Bud of MC. You can do this with just about any set of rules.
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u/firebolt_wt 15d ago
"If I was a teacher I'd punish students according to what my feelings tell me because 'why not' instead of giving scores based on the rules I wrote"
Well, sounds like you'd be a shite teacher then, pal
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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 15d ago
I'm also not going to reward somebody for being purposefully obtuse.
The best thing I could probably do is not address it any way since some form of attention is what OP really wanted.
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u/minnow87 15d ago
Maliciously weaponizing stupidity. Oh my God, Iām required to put my name in the header?!! Iāll show that darn professor! I have to center my title?! That requires a whole extra mouse click! Iāll show him for trying to instill an attention to detail that will translate to the real world. My professor will rue this day, mwahaha!
Op, you are certifiably petulant, and not nearly as clever as you think you are.
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u/HaroerHaktak 15d ago
Share the formatting rules. We the hive mind can find more exploits to use and abuse.
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u/DoublePreparation241 15d ago
Wish I still had it, this was years ago and it never occurred to me to save a copy. But honestly this sub could probably find five more holes in any syllabus's formatting section within an hour, professors write those things assuming nobody reads them that closely.
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u/Stormagedd0nDarkLord 15d ago
"What do you mean we can't use Wing Dings!"
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u/trismagestus 15d ago
"Tines New Roman, 9pt. Single spaced."
Dangit!
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u/Stormagedd0nDarkLord 15d ago
Done. Entire document now only has a single space. Used it for my name.
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u/homme_chauve_souris 15d ago
Printed on a 9-pin Epson MX80 dot matrix printer for maximum illegibility.
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u/clintj1975 15d ago
EEEE EEEEEEEEEEE EEEE EEE EEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EE EE EEE EEEE
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u/Sceptically 15d ago
"Tines New Roman, 9pt. Single spaced."
Make a new font comprised of three three-tine forks in the shape of each letter, call it "Tines New Roman". The three 3-tine forks means it'll have the requisite nine points. Single spaced you can just play straight.
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u/b0w3n 15d ago
I recall one of the teachers requiring 12pt font, but not requiring a specific type of font.
When you use monospace fonts, you can meet the page length requirement in about 3/4 the amount of words. Sometimes even more. I was using all the old typing tricks like double spaces after periods (I still do this to this day, I can't break the habit) or adjusting page margins slightly. Courier at 12pt is ridiculously space consuming too, you can probably drop it to 11 or even 10 and still be golden.
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u/Anachronisticpoet 15d ago
>>āNot the normal MLA or APA stuff, he had his own extra rules stapled onto the syllabus on top of that. Font, margins, spacing, where the page numbers had to go,ā
These are all aspects of MLA and APA, btw. Professors list them specifically because otherwise students donāt do them.
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u/GusleyBillows 15d ago edited 15d ago
This needs to be higher up. These are pretty standard requirements for college courses that actually want to prepare you to write formal papers in your career.
I wouldn't have gotten through middle school without using double-spaced 12pt. Times New Roman, and nobody teaching grown ass adults is going to let you skirt page minimums by fucking with the margins and spacing.
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u/dream-of-earthshine 15d ago
Oh you had to centre the title? Yes because that's what MLA specifies.
The bigger question is how they turned in any 7 page essay with 0 works cited.
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u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog 15d ago
Because this didnāt happen. Any professor who gets asked a question like that in class just says to meet them after class or during office hours. OP didnāt have a movie moment where they owned the prof and the whole class cheered.
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u/jadorelesavocats 15d ago
Exactly. As if we have to believe that OP sacrificed their whole grade for that assignment just to teach the prof something.
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u/Fragrant-Employer-60 15d ago
Because āformatting creditā would never be 100% of the paper, OP didnāt think this through.
My professor would have given like a 10% for formatting and docked the rest for not doing whatever the actual assignment called for.
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u/teh_maxh 14d ago
I've seen professors file plagiarism reports just because a citation was formatted wrong. Failing to include citations at all would be a justified report.
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u/that_creepy_doll 15d ago
Yeah i have no doubt that the professor was probably inssuferable in other aspects, but after the absolute nightmares ive seen other students turn in while in college i also have no doubt that that syllabus was born out of pure exhaustion of having to deal with knucleheads that dont even know what justiifed aligment means. some of those power point slides man...
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u/rednick953 15d ago
I also wonder why a sophomore in college needs to be told what the title of a paper should be and why it was expected to have the titles of all papers for the class in the syllabus?
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u/prettylikeapineapple 14d ago
YES! This is driving me crazy, all this stuff is normal MLA. We all had to follow this at my uni, that's just academia. Also, as annoying as it can feel, formatting and attention to detail are important! I'm so mad at this post lol
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u/DudeByTheTree 15d ago
Congrats, you made life harder for everyone else around you. Want a cookie?
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u/vampyrewolf 15d ago
Reminds me of my grade 11 Chem teacher, he had 2 quirks... Always said "read the instructions first", and always handed out 3 or 4 different exams so your neighbors couldn't cheat.
Every lab was sitting out on the front table to work through at your own pace, with clear target dates on them (ie "lab 4 by 10 Oct), as that was what the exams were based on. Those of us clearly ahead of the class got exams with instructions that more or less said " do the last 3 questions and hand it in". Those were always the bonus point questions and 1 actual question.
Had a few exams with a "1/1 + 10 bonus" marks.
There were other exams scattered throughout the room with similar directions but if folks don't read the instructions they're not going to figure it out.
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u/Orsurac 15d ago
Well, this certainly is malicious. Nothing you described being malicious about complying with sounded unreasonable though tbh. Just sounds like you wanted to be malicious about someone who's style was to be more clear and structured in expectations than most. I mostly feel for that teacher.
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u/cspinelive 15d ago
Titling it Essay is a problem. Formatting rules are for formatting. Professor would have been well within his rights to dock points for content here because Essay is not an appropriate title.Ā
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u/dream-of-earthshine 15d ago
Nothing described even sounds outside the normal MLA/APA.
It sounds like the teacher was trying to enforce academic writing but knowing students wouldn't read the style guide was giving specific requirements.
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u/Kentaaa_ 15d ago
Given how formatting changes from one professor to another, I'm not even surprised the professor listed his requirements. Maybe I'm weird, but I think that's helpful.
I had professors who would just say APA and than bitch that something isn't to their liking.
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u/Mist2393 14d ago
I had a professor who hated all style guides except the style guide for some niche geology journal and had us all use that. Did he provide us the guide? Nope. Just told us the name of the journal and let us go find it. I wouldāve loved for him to have been this specific.
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u/Present_Speech_7017 15d ago
I was part of teaching a course this year where the grading rubric said nothing about docking points for students writing lab reports full of irrelevant information, AI-generated figures with random arrows and symbols in them, 500 word 'abstracts', etc. As long as most of the main stuff was more or less in there, you'd pass, no matter how much of a sewer of crap I had to wade through to find it.Ā
Going by the rubric, I had to give some of the worst reports I'd ever seen similar grades to some of the best, because you could not win points for clear structure either.
Most of these students with the crap reports are not gonna bother reading my notes. They are unlikely to learn much about how to write a good report. It's infuriating.
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u/squirrelwithnut 15d ago
You said your professor ended up making his rules twice as long. So... you basically made your professor's extra set of rules, which were already annoying to deal with, twice as hard to remember when writing an assignment and twice as frustrating to deal with; not only for yourself but for every other student in your class and every class after yours. If I were in that class I would have fucking hated you.
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u/Fabulous-Tartlet 15d ago edited 15d ago
Or maybe spend more time on writing a good essay instead of messing with the formating rules just to piss off the teacher. Rules which actually make sense if pitching to say - a literary agent or compiling a CV.
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u/MoreColorfulCarsPlz 15d ago
Yeah, this doesn't come across as malicious compliance. This comes across as petulant compliance. Why is a student so upset at formatting that they sabotage their own work? It wasn't even unreasonable requests.
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u/MarcosEsquandolas 15d ago
And it actually led to the formatting requirements being more annoying and stringent moving forward. Iād be annoyed as a classmate at this person for making us read more detailed instructions in the future.Ā
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u/MoreColorfulCarsPlz 15d ago
The prof was basically handing out free points. Follow these reasonable instructions and you get points. Great, I say!
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u/Dame38 15d ago
This. Every enititled "I never cracked a book once last semester" slacker thinks they're natural geniuses, Can't even lie effectively: Ā "every loophole I used was individually closed."
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u/OoglyMoogly76 15d ago
They seem to think that the classroom is a courtroom where you can win by finding technicalities in the syllabus. It is not. It is a dictatorship where the teacher has final say on everything regardless of course policy. The course policy is an attempt at diplomatic communication of expectations.
If the attendance policy says āyou must sign your name on the sign in sheet at the beginning of each class to be counted presentā and you have your buddy sign in for you while you stay home, you havenāt cracked the code at never showing up and getting credit. Youāve just put yourself and your friend up for falsifying academic records and youāll be lucky if you just get counted absent for that day.
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u/thesuperunknown 15d ago
It has always struck me as weird for any university-level course to take attendance. As a student, you paid for the course, and neither the professor nor the institution need care whether or not you show up to claim the education you paid for. And if you can complete all the coursework and pass the course without attending a single class, then (assuming you didnāt cheat) youāre still entitled to your course credit, as you met the requirements and clearly learned the material to at least the minimum standard.
Would I recommend that any student actually do this? No, because theyād be cheating themselves out of an education that they paid for, and ultimately they are the only one who loses out. But at the same time, university is about teaching the skills necessary for independence and self-reliance, and allowing students the freedom to make choices (whether good or bad) and learn from the consequences is an essential part of that. Taking attendance is completely antithetical to that objective.
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u/OoglyMoogly76 15d ago edited 15d ago
I donāt completely disagree, but I have seen what outcomes you get with a non-existent attendance policy and what you get with a rigid attendance policy.
It depends on the structure of the class and what skills you are attempting to teach.
For example, a chemistry lecture hall class where the only grades are a mid term and a final exam should be attendance optional. You either followed along and got the knowledge or you didnāt and you donāt. Taking attendance in a lecture hall is just a nightmare in general so I donāt fuck with that shit.
In a smaller class where youāre teaching a process like researching or writing, things that students need to complete with the professor and their classmates, then attendance should be mandatory. What I typically do with these classes is make it so that every class day we complete an assignment that is graded and the only way to complete it is to physically be there. I do it this way because what is important for me from a pedagogical approach is not the product you make at the end of the course (usually a research paper) but the fact that you can complete the process of making it. LLMs exist that can easily create these research papers on demand, poorly I might add, but I want to see that you know how to do it yourself. I can only evaluate it if you physically do the task in the room with me.
In general, college students donāt have frontal lobes yet so they usually wonāt make good choices for themselves unless you design a system where they can see immediate, measurable impact to their grade when they stop attending. My exam grade averages also tend to be higher in semesters where attendance is mandatory as opposed to optional. Without it, they usually just disappear for 3 months then reappear and freak out and ask for makeups and extra credit
Iād love to work in an educational system where students have the ability to attend classes with no incentive except their own education, but thatās just not the way the average 18-22 year old operates. They thrive in structure and accountability.
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u/Throwittfaway26 15d ago
Yeah I agree. I had a prof in undergrad who was like this because he wanted us to be really good at following detailed direction and be meticulous. He also forced us to go to office hours to edit the first draft of our final essay. His marking was so strict he said that anyone who got over 80% on the final essay got a guaranteed letter of recommendation for grad school because we had what it took. I squeaked by with an 83% and he was true to his word.
I also later ended up working for an academic journal for a while and my editing skills were top notch because I read the style guide and applied it effectively. He just wanted to set us up for success (and also not read 80 essays a semester all in different fonts, margins, letter size etc).
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u/meagercoyote 15d ago
My first year of college, one of my professors had a section in the syllabus about how to email them. Basically they had to start with "Dear Professor x," and not use slang. I thought it was a bit ridiculous until I realized that they put it in there because some students genuinely didn't know how to write an email in a professional context.
This sounds like the same thing. A style guide to ensure students can write a professional looking essay. None of the rules OP listed are all that egregious.
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u/saguarobird 15d ago
I also think this makes it easier and quicker to grade. The spacing/font may also be easier to read for the professor. If I had to flip through inconsistent formatting for dozens and dozens of essays, I would probably go cross eyed. It would be like reading a novel, but every chapter switched up its formatting.
Students berate teachers for not actually reading their essays, then they act like jackasses when a teacher tries to make it easier and quicker to read said essays. Ya can't win!
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u/Poh-Tay-To 15d ago
When we were first allowed to type up essays (yes I'm from the generation where we used to write essays by hand) I was overjoyed.
My first essay was completely typed up in Gothic font. It was completely unreadable
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u/e37d93eeb23335dc 15d ago
Every generation seems to have something like this. First word processors - use tons of fonts in one paper and lots of font sizes.Ā
First web pages - blink tags, animated gifs, a riot of colors, scrolling text, etc.Ā
Itās like people need to try out all the bells and whistles before learning that less is more.Ā
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u/homme_chauve_souris 15d ago
šš¬š±š„š¦š š“šÆš¦š±š¦š«š¤ šš¦š«'š± š±š„šš± š²š«šÆš¢šš”ššš©š¢... ššāššš šššš š āš ššš ššš ššš āššš.
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u/robertshepherd 15d ago
I think the winner here was the university that continued to take your money..
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u/Bargle-Nawdle-Zouss 15d ago
So... you got full formatting credit for that paper, and then you got a zero for the rest of it because it had no content.
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u/MagnusRusson 15d ago
It sounds like they did write the essay normally tho
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u/girlikecupcake 15d ago
A six page essay in a college level English class with a blank works cited page doesn't sound like it was written properly, though.
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u/MoreColorfulCarsPlz 15d ago
It sounds like textbook plagiarism honestly. Unless all 7 pages were stream of consciousness of purely original thought.
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u/stellesbells 15d ago
Maybe I'm missing something here. Did your actions benefit future students in any way? It sounds like his written instructions became longer and more specific, but you don't mention people struggling to understand them in the first place, so, what? Now they just have more words to read through to end up in the same place?
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u/Flaydowsk 15d ago
When I worked as a teacher, I was a hardass in the formatting by the standards of the school and demographic (higschoolers aren't expected to know APA in my country. Hell many college graduates can't use it either).
I requested a very watered down version of APA (name, title, year, link if it's a website but with full URL), as well as some basic formatting (name on top right corner, Arial 11, black font, not less than 3 pages and not more than 6).
Finally, basic report structure: Problem, basic theory, hypothesis, experiment design, experiment results, conclusion, bibliography.
And -1 point for every spell mistake. Word has autocorrect, you got no excuse.
This was bc the class I taught was "Methodology of the investigation".
I even showed them a "good case" and "bad case" from previous students (names erased ofc) for them to check.
99% didn't read or care about the rules.
First review comes around, everyone gets nuked to the ground.
People with -5 points out of 10 and the such. Every paper printed and graded by hand by me, pointing out what they ignored.
Of course, many came to complaing and bargain "so I put my name at the end of the text instead of the start. ĀæSo what? Yo can tell who wrote it, ĀæIsn't it enough?" and such.
After that first evaluation, I always had a talk with the class, which always went something like:
"You guys are used to ignoring or guessing instructions. If you can't follow a simple instruction of "put your name in the corner", Āæhow can I trust you to use chemicals or power tools in the correct manner? This isn't about me being unable to read a paper, but about you being unable to write one and reading a syllabus"
Afterwards, I would cancel the assignment and ask for it once more.
Lo and behold, most people would now pass it. Some would still not care, but hey, you win some, you lose some.
I did other kinds of tricks too, like the classic test whose first instruction is "read the whole thing before starting" where each question is insanely hard and the last question is "don't write anything, just wait 5 min an turn your test in".
Or the classic "all answers are C" test.
90% of students would fail both of them...
Once.
My goal was to teach them to read with attention, to trust their knowledge and to be analytical and critical instead of trying to guess or doubting themselves.
Once they noticed that you didn't need to guess or jump through hoops, just to read the information presented calmly, they would all end up passing.
I'm happy to brag that during my 2 years, in my classes of 30ish students, every semester only 3 at most would fail my class, and it was mostly due to not bringing their assigments or skipping tests, not due to failing them.
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u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog 15d ago
Itās like Redditors have never been in the world before. I could see the first half of this story being true, up until OP roasted the prof in front of the entire class. They probably got docked for a messy paper (which most profs do anyway) and never got their marks back.
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u/yoursunny 15d ago
I once had a college essay for which we received a Microsoft Word document that contains the formatting rules and could serve as a template, except that that document is not an actual Word template: it has formatting directly applied to each line, instead of defined in the Styles menu; even its Table of Contents was typed manually.
I was unconfident on my Microsoft Word skills, so I formatted my essay in HTML+CSS. The professor refused to accept the essay, adding a rule that the essay must be submitted in a Word document.
I eventually printed the HTML webpage into PDF, converted each page into a picture, and inserted the pictures into a Word document with zero margin. This is technically a Word document and the professor had to accept it, as they never said the Word document must contain words.
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u/oylaura 15d ago
When I was in high school in the '70s, I had a teacher hand out a pop quiz to the class. Everyone groaned of course.
Each step was numbered. Number one said, "Read all instructions before beginning".
Each subsequent step had some silly exercise. One was raise your right hand for 10 seconds, another was to stand up and say the pledge of allegiance, and other silly stuff.
The final step said, "Write your name at the top of the paper and hand it in. Do nothing else".
As you can imagine, there were a number of people who stood up and recited the pledge of allegiance, making it abundantly clear that they had not read all the instructions.
Another teacher tried it a year later, but I recognized it for what it was and enjoyed the show.
It was fun to watch.
Later on, in the '90s, I helped my friend's Junior High aged son with a paper. What he had written was excellent, but he wasn't being graded on the content, he was being graded, as you were, on the formatting. The point of the exercise was to see how well they followed directions. He could have written "Lorem ipsum" for all the teacher cared, all he wanted was for the kids to learn to read the instructions and follow them. I thought it was a colossal waste of time.
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u/Toadsted 15d ago
If the first step is to do something, you can't just not do it because the last step says not to anything else; you haven't even gotten to that point yet, and it's not logically sound to begin with.
It doesn't say to skip steps 2-5, it just says do nothing else other than what is said on the last step. Reading is not the same as doing, so you would still continue on to the second step after reading.
If the trick is to follow the last step and nothing else, then the first step becomes invalidated; it then becomes a paradox and unsolvable problem.
Some people think they've made a masterclass riddle, when in order to "complete" it you have to follow a 4th wall expectation, like be psychic.
All that did was embarrass and frustrate students for no valid reason.
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u/Subject-Kiwi-6079 15d ago
"Do nothing else" could easily refer to "nothing else except the instructions above."Ā
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u/Doctor_Boombastic 15d ago
Ill-advised, but the compliance was malicious.
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u/anomalous_cowherd 15d ago
Malicious compliance is often ill-advised, because the people creating the necessity for it are rarely going to be the logical accepting type.
Doesn't stop it being fun.
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u/TheRealZuke 15d ago
Usually the malicious compliance is in response to an offense by the other party though, to either get back at them or prove why their rules / orders were a problem. This isnāt that. OP went out of their way to antagonize (and attempt to publicly embarrass) their professor who, from what theyāre describing, had perfectly reasonable guidelines that were more lax than usual, they made a point of promising full marks if rules were followed (not threaten to take away points if something wasnāt strictly adhered to), and all OP did was force them to make MORE restrictive rules to prevent people from doing stupid bullshit for no reason.
The stories in this sub are usually about someone using the rules or orders to fix a problem or at least get some revenge / justice. This OP just did it to be a dick and create more problema for the next students.
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u/Dr__Flo__ 15d ago
Yeah, in a professional environment, how you present information is as important as the information itself.
This professor was trying to instill the importance of standardized formatting and OP completely missed the point to be a smart ass.
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15d ago
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/BakedWizerd 15d ago
And what professor would openly discuss a studentās grade in class? They would just tell them to meet during office hours.
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u/Spl4sh3r 15d ago
Just because the formatting rule was followed exactly doesn't mean you get points on the actual essay.
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u/SmooK_LV 15d ago
Outside of school this stuff barely works. I get fined for incorrect rules, I point them out in writing, I get ignored. Or I get response, they point out incorrect references, I get ignored in response.
People in the field will often not give a shit because there is lack of care for small fines.
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u/Hmmhowaboutthis 15d ago
Sure, naming it essay fulfilled the formatting credit b it didnāt you say that was graded separately from the actual writing? So on the writing grade he couldāve docked you for the title at least.
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u/Ol_Man_J 15d ago
"Ā I will just call him Dr. H"
You didn't mention his pseudonym again in the entire passage. I'm sure the rest of your writing is impeccable though.
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u/misterfuss 15d ago
I had a professor dock me points because I wrote my answers to his questions āwithout thinking thoroughly about them.ā
I had answered the questions quickly and left after doing so.
Based on his assessment of my first test, I always stayed until the end of the allotted time before I turned in my exam.
I always scored very high in my exams after the first one based on changing my behavior.
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u/Averander 15d ago
Missed opportunity to have the title be 'Centered' rather than the title of the essay and put 'Your Name' instead of your actual name.
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u/frarugi87 15d ago
How naive of you... You don't need to exploit ALL loopholes at once, since they will get patched... One at a time: let him rewrite those rules every single time, or have him lose hours on it figuring out how you can break them again... š
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u/tar_heeldd 15d ago
Never go into copywriting or marketing fields. Clients can often come back with specificity like this and you just have to do it since they are paying you. Or risk losing the client. This is still funny.
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u/Flotilla_guerrilla 15d ago
As an English professor nearing the end of his career, I can tell you that formatting is actually quite important. Imagine the prof having to read dozens and dozens of papers each semester. If the formatting is correct (and he gave you a clear template), he can focus entirely on what you have written. If you pull some childish stunt like you described? Imagine how much attention your words will receive.
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u/Needrain47 15d ago
it sounds like you don't understand that MLA, APA, etc cover more than just how you cite sources. They also cover things like formatting the title and page numbers. It's called a style guide.
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u/PattyRain 15d ago
I'm trying to figure out if this is actually malicious compliance or not.Ā It seems like compliance with extra things added rather than being maliciously compliant. There seems to be a subtle difference and that this isn't quite being maliciously complisnt.Ā
Am I wrong about that? I'm ok if I am. I'm just trying to understand if there is actually a difference or not.
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u/redneckerson_1951 15d ago
Its been 57 years since this unplanned event occurred. Visualize 2nd year high school algebra and trig. I am struggling to maintain a passing grade (70 or D-) . The teacher is frustrated, the principal is frustrated, Mom and Dad are livid and I am at my rope's end.
Concurrent with math, I am enrolled in applied electronics class. For me, it was easy peasy. Needed math was taught by the instructor. He made it simple.
The teaching of logarithms in math class happened to coincide with use of logarithms to evaluate time constants in electronics, which was simply applied logs. Suddenly, my test scores and pop quizzes soared from D's & E's (Failing) to high B's and A's.
We had a student teacher that was leading lectures and upon returning a pop quiz on logs from the previous day, he slammed the answer sheet down on my desk and barked, "I don't know how you are doing it, but I will catch you." Thus inferring I was cheating.
I kind of barked back at him, that Mr. Smith in electronics had taught logarithms to the group and he made it easy to understand. The student teacher stormed off with my sharp reply.
In a couple of minutes the assigned teacher who was observing the student teacher during his six week tour of duty, suddenly jumped up, stormed over to my desk, grabbed the answer sheet and blew out of the room like I had poked her in the crevice of the dark side of her moon with a taser. Class ended and I moved to Old English Lit class. When that ended I headed home.
Next day, I walk into the electronics class to find Mr. Smith standing by his podium. Before I could say "Good Morning," he raised his hand and used his index finger to motion for me to walk directly to his position. With a half smirk he stated, "The next time you decide to wind that woman up, give me a heads up."
Being a bit of a dunce, I did not quite comprehend what transpired. A few years later one of the students that worked in admin as an assistant, spotted me in the local grocery store. He took time to tell me that Mrs. Pane stormed into the Admin Office, walked right on into the principal's office and began bending his ear before he could get a word in edgewise. Mr. Smith was then summoned to explain why he was teaching math in his class.
To Mr. Smith's credit, he explained logarithms, like most other parts of math were integral to understanding electronic theory and that he had identified on numerous occasions that the electronic students were sorely lacking in math skills needed to understand the material being taught.
Long story short, he finished icing the cake when he replied, I am really sorry that my success in teaching is causing Mrs. Pane duress, but at least Redd is learning in my class." Apparently that was the last straw before Ms. Pane hurled a load of fertilizer into the ventilator and went on a nearly rabid rant about how impossible having me in class was. Mrs. Pane did not return the next year, the principal resigned unexpectedly and some school board members blamed me for loss of an exemplary principal and gifted teacher.
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u/Geminii27 15d ago
and some school board members blamed me for loss of an exemplary principal and gifted teacher.
"...and also those other two."
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u/kittenvera9 15d ago
professors can be so strict about formatting, it's like they're grading a work of art instead of an essay
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u/ShamrockHammer 15d ago
As someone who was accused of plagiarism because I had missed some citation sections in a format way outside of my course of study, I very much enjoyed seeing some power tripping dickhead professor getting thrown back at them.
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u/JustMeLurkingAround- 15d ago
So you made it worse for everyone, having now the already excessive instructions doubled just to be petty.
It's easy to say it was worth it, when the consequences are to be carried by everyone else.
Congrats to fucking over every future student of this prof.
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u/NotPrepared2 15d ago
"Every safety regulation is written in blood." Apparently, so are essay formatting rules.
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u/toodlesandpoodles 15d ago
There is formatting, and there is content. I would have docked points for content such as a non-descriptive title, not deleting reptitious text, etc. Formatting rules are checklists that can be followed. Content isn't. Just because you followed the formatting rules doesn't mean you have written a good paper.
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u/Arachnidle 15d ago
Honestly, your fellow students can't stand guys like you. You think you're a rebel but you're just a distraction. Even when you win, you lose, and we all have to wait for your song and dance to end before moving on.
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u/anothertypicalcmmnt 15d ago
So you just make things more difficult for future classes? You said he doubled the length of the formatting section and made things even MORE specific. You might have annoyed him for one day, but you make things harder for every student after you lol.
He might have had those formatting rules simply to make sure his students actually knew how to adjust margins, fonts, headers, etc. in Microsoft Word/student's program of choice.
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u/DiscombobulatedOwl50 15d ago
Professor: āI have these 5 formatting rulesā¦ā
Next semester:
Professor: āI have these 25 formatting rulesā¦ā
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u/Adventurous_Egg_9500 15d ago
Oh you must be fun. Employee handbooks are made for you and stupid rules exist because of that.
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u/Ok_Delay_911 15d ago
The content of a title has nothing to do with formatting. Neither does the content of a citations page. These have to do with the actual assignment.
Formatting has to do with the placement of something on the page, the font, font size, effects like bolding, bullet points etc.Ā I feel like you might be confused on this point.
If this is something you actually did (vs something you just daydreamed about doing), then you deserve a shitty grade.
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u/Mindless_Way9940 15d ago
So because you decided to be stupid, everyone else had to follow an even longer rule set....
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u/Several_Hour_347 15d ago
This is stupid and not āmalicious complianceā because he can immediately just dock you points and move on
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u/EveryAccount7729 15d ago
Uhhhh
you have to follow the formatting or else lose points
this does not imply "if you follow the formatting you get full points no matter what"
your post is extremely stupid.
you decided it would be ok to just name it "ESSAY' as long as it's centered it should get full credit? That's not implied at all by what your professor said or did and that you think it was and are trying to pretend this was some type of "gotcha" is you being slow IRL.
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u/Dame38 15d ago edited 15d ago
You did something "out of spite" and thenĀ "every loophole I used was individually closed."
Sounds llike you're not being entirely honest. Your professor can run his class as he sees fit. This is college. Level up.
And this wasn't a "needed credit" class. The was most definitely a required writing class for all incoming undergraduates.
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u/littleapple798 15d ago
To play devil's advocate, there are moments in "the real world" where you have to follow annoying rules exactly for some historical or other reason. Legal documents, work rules, compliance, etc.
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u/magaketo 15d ago
I took courses at University of Phoenix many years ago. They were all into the Little/Brown rules. We even had to but the book
What a joke. Nobody cared and the instructors were not trained to enforce it . It was a free for all.
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u/somethingclever76 15d ago
Is a professor normally allowed to change a syllabus in the misdle of the semester? Those are usually very important documents and I would figure once the semester is started they are locked in until next semester.
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u/-Casey-Diaz- 15d ago edited 15d ago
was known across the whole department for being insane about formatting.
Not the normal MLA or APA stuff
Font, margins, spacing, where the page numbers had to go
These are normal formatting rules. Both APA and MLA have strict requirements for all those things. Unless he said to use something like APA, but then also required different formatting requirements than what APA specifies, he was not being insane. He was just teaching normal university stuff, and you were being a baby about it.
Imo, you were being childish and immature and he was honorable and kept his word, like a true professor does. The only reason university formatting styles are so strict is because of people like you (and messy and disorganized people). If all academic literature was written like yours, science would grind to a halt.
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format
https://www.easybib.com/guides/citation-guides/mla-format/formatting-page-numbers-mla/
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u/timeslider 15d ago
It's cute when non-programmers say "follow my instructions exactly"
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u/juntar74 15d ago edited 15d ago
I would have titled my essay "Centered", because the title has to be centered.
Edit: Thanks for all the awards!