If I were a teacher, I’d ideally allow this (and the sports fan too, for that matter, if I knew he was a big enough fan).
There’s no problem in the ideal form, but I would anticipate a lot of problems in real life—other students not understanding exactly how much this person loved the Exemplars and misinterpreting it as “You get an exemption for going to a rock concert”, other students trying to convince you they like [thing X] just as much as this guy liked the Exemplars and you having to judge lots of difficult cases to see if their fandom is truly as great as this guy’s is and inevitably getting some of them wrong.
If I really knew what to do, this post would have been titled “Eight Short Studies On Excuses, Plus The Answers To Them”
A potential solution for appeasing other students and preventing them from faking Sports Fandom—while still accommodating a Sports Fan’s reasonable situation—is to give the Sports Fan an extra assignment to complete. This would dissuade other students from turning in their paper late (because they would want to avoid having to do extra work), but would satisfy the Sports Fan since they would do anything to be able to see their team, band, etc.
The teacher would still have to have strict guidelines for this accommodation: 1) the request would have to be deemed reasonable 2) the assignment couldn’t be too easy or many students would take advantage of it 3) The extension for the original assignment couldn’t be too accommodating, just long enough to give the student the time they lost from attending the event But this could be a conceivable solution to this problem.
“If it is true that you would really do anything to see them perform, that implies that the performance is worth at least +100 utility to you, to make up for the loss of missing the essay. Therefore, I will allow you to turn it in, but only for 75% credit, disincentivizing lying about your true preferences but still preserving most of the mutual utility.”
If I were a teacher, I’d ideally allow this (and the sports fan too, for that matter, if I knew he was a big enough fan).
There’s no problem in the ideal form, but I would anticipate a lot of problems in real life—other students not understanding exactly how much this person loved the Exemplars and misinterpreting it as “You get an exemption for going to a rock concert”, other students trying to convince you they like [thing X] just as much as this guy liked the Exemplars and you having to judge lots of difficult cases to see if their fandom is truly as great as this guy’s is and inevitably getting some of them wrong.
If I really knew what to do, this post would have been titled “Eight Short Studies On Excuses, Plus The Answers To Them”
A potential solution for appeasing other students and preventing them from faking Sports Fandom—while still accommodating a Sports Fan’s reasonable situation—is to give the Sports Fan an extra assignment to complete. This would dissuade other students from turning in their paper late (because they would want to avoid having to do extra work), but would satisfy the Sports Fan since they would do anything to be able to see their team, band, etc.
The teacher would still have to have strict guidelines for this accommodation: 1) the request would have to be deemed reasonable 2) the assignment couldn’t be too easy or many students would take advantage of it 3) The extension for the original assignment couldn’t be too accommodating, just long enough to give the student the time they lost from attending the event But this could be a conceivable solution to this problem.
“If it is true that you would really do anything to see them perform, that implies that the performance is worth at least +100 utility to you, to make up for the loss of missing the essay. Therefore, I will allow you to turn it in, but only for 75% credit, disincentivizing lying about your true preferences but still preserving most of the mutual utility.”