ADDRESS THE ROOT CAUSE. A Rate Your Students post lets an anonymous commenter whinge.

I have been sitting at home all weekend, trying not to hate the shitty students and trying to bolster my self-esteem and willingness to do the job by working hard to focus on the good ones. I have fall syllabi to write. As I think about how I need to modify the basic course syllabus I have employed for the last 3 years, it just kills me that all of my modifications are centered on how to deal with the lazy shits who don't need to be in college.

How to dock them points for not coming to my class, even though I'm philosophically opposed to such point-docking. How to make my syllabus SCREAM of my intent to fail plagiarists. How to set up traps for the lazy, the uninspired, the fresh-air-stealers. How to ensure, through multiple and diverse grading opportunities, that all of the Fs and Ds and Cs and Bs will be unassailable grades, able to withstand grade appeals managed by the even the most molly-coddling administrators...

I highlighted the money phrase. The fault, dear readers, lies with ourselves. Have we spoken up in faculty meetings about the folly of access-assessment-remediation-retention? Have we demonstrated the failings of the Division of Molly-Coddling within student affairs by complying, exactly, with all of their requests (the best way of demonstrating flaws with a rule) or by organizing mass defiance of the rules (can an entire tenured faculty be fired for such a subjective cause?) Have we told deans, provosts, presidents, trustees that we were NOT hired as special education teachers or to provide a mulligan for high school.

To repeat, now that a new academic year approaches. Where one is tempted to rate one's students, one must look first to the actions of therapeutic thumbsuckers, assessors of the obvious, and other related impedimenta to the delivery of higher education.