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Professor James Matchen has chosen to teach an introductory economics course Satisfactory/No Credit this semester.
"I'm not required to teach the course by my department," Matchen, an art history professor, explained. "So it made sense to do it S/NC. After all, that's why I chose to teach at Brown: I can teach things I know nothing about without being held back by worrying about failure."
"All you have to do to pass is show up to lectures," Matchen said. "I just sit in the back of the room and check my email on my phone, and pretend to teach when the students are looking."
Matchen told The Noser that he expects to put in approximately the same amount of work into his lesson plans as he would if he were teaching the course for a grade. "It'll just be nice to not be stressed about it if my other classes get crazy," he said. "Like, if there's a problem set due and I'm having a really busy week, I can just grade like, half the students. Or skip over some of the questions they ask at office hours. Gotta love pass/fail!"
Matchen said he also opted to go out with friends instead of preparing the course's midterm. "But come on, every question is like, 'Shift the supply or demand curve,' right? You'd have to be an idiot to fail at teaching that," he noted.
Like most professors at Brown, Matchen usually teaches at least one course S/NC each semester. "During shopping period, I couldn't decide which of my courses to teach pass/fail. It was hard to tell which would be the most annoying ones that I'd want to be able to slack off on," said Matchen. "Luckily, the day before the deadline to switch teaching options, I gave a quiz in intro Econ. and my students totally blew it. S/NC was the obvious choice."
"I want to have time to experience the social aspects of being a professor," Matchen continued. "Hanging out with the other professors, decorating my office with thick books and comic strips that are relevant to my academic interests, headlining faculty fellows dinners - without being distracted by all the time I have to spend teaching."
Matchen admits one downside of the decision to teach S/NC is that he feels slightly guilty for disappointing his students. "I had this one student in a class last semester that I taught for a grade, so she knows I can do better. I feel sort of bad half-assing my responses to her papers," he acknowledged.
The student in question, Maria Rubin '11, agrees. "I understand that professors here have a lot going on, so S/NC is a tempting option for them," she said. "But when they use that option to slack off, they're only hurting themselves. And also all of their students."
