ADDRESSING THE ACADEMY/york university inc.

"an intellectually & politically independent rag which does not whitewash YUFA nor the administration, nor PEN nor AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL but which is generously
contributed to by YUFA members.

ANNOUNCING GRADE-SOFT 1.2

Yes, Grade-Soft 1.1 has now been updated!

The distributors of Grade-Soft 1.1 now realize that the Admin. computer is unable to accept the global standard ASCII character set, and only accepts grades that are input via carbon blackenings on flat dry xylem mashates (pencil bubbles on paper forms). As a result we have now released Grade-Soft 1.2!

We apologize for any inconvience caused by our earlier version.

Grade-Soft 1.2 software now interfaces with the latest in robotics technology, the Canadarm***

(mostly developed right here on campus, I might add). So now the random list of grades generated to excessive numbers of decimal places is first:

1) converted to letter grades at no extra cost,

2) converted to pencil bubbles on the appropriate form, by the Canadarm (with requisite number of "mistakes" including frameshift errors, additions/deletions and mis-filling of bubbles, eraser marks and smudges, to give it that human touch we all have grown to appreciate around these parts)

3) the Canadarm then picks up the form and feeds it directly into the Admin. grade form reader.

As before, Grade-Soft 1.2 ensures maximum information loss in the grade transmission process. All features of the original Grade-Soft 1.1 are retained (well most of them). SEE ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT BELOW.

*** Implementation of the final phase of Grade-Soft 1.2 requires that our NSERC proposal (for $345 Million) to purchase a Canadarm is fully funded. We intend to mount the Canadarm on the 9th floor where it will easily be able to reach down to us all to do its business (huh, this sounds familiar somehow).

THE ORIGINAL GRADE-SOFT 1.1

Announcing Grade-Soft 1.1, not only a software package that produces grades but, as the name implies, reflects the current academic standards on campus.

I suggest you all use this program and have your TAs use it as well. Its the ideal tool to use for those illegal grade requests. No more gravity driven methods are required.

The program works in the following way.

You simply enter the following information:

0) A random seed number (perhaps the salary of a randomly chosen YUFA-ite).
1) The range of the grades (e.g. if you marked essays and they were worth 50% of the final grade then enter 50%).
2) Enter the number of students in the course.

AND THATS ALL!!!

The output is as follows:

A column of random numbers (and letter grades at no extra cost) that potentially range from 0 to whatever maximum you specified (e.g. in the example above grades would range randomly from 0 to 50%).

Excessive numbers of decimal places will be provided so that there will be maximum information loss when converting your numerical grades (which technically don't exist on campus) to letter grades and then to GPA. (Sir Ronald Fisher's got to be rolling in his grave).

The real elegance of the program is that it provides valuable information to the administration in exactly the same manner as they are accustomed to providing numerical (e.g. accounting) information to YUFA. I know they will value having long strings of random numbers without any student name or student numbers attached to them.

Why clutter things up with excess information?

You could offer to hire a 3rd party auditor to verify that the program did indeed produce the grades you submitted (make certain that you remember the random seed number if you make this offer).

Note that the program is currently available only in PC format, however, Mac versions and a version capable of running on the Eunuch's cluster on campus, are in the works.

Note, if sufficiently attractive, I will continue to update the program. At present the pseudo-random grades are sampled from a uniform distribution. In the future you will be able to specify different sampling distributions including:

1) Normal distribution
2) Binomial distribution
3) Poisson distribution
4) other user specified distributions

Grade-Soft 1.1 will be distributed free of charge to all YUFA members and TAs.

The pre-debugged version will be licenced to the adminstration at an annual fee of $100,000.00. Bugs will be added periodically to ensure it is up to the standards of other software packages used by the administration.

We also intend to "parallelize" the code so that the administration will need to purchase a supercomputer to run the program.

Finally, the graphic user interface will be enhanced yearly thus requiring the administration to purchase yearly, first 17, then 19, then 21, then 23,... inch monitors for all secretaries on campus. Ultimately, we will introduce our virtual reality interface when costs of this technology are at a maximum.