Is this just?

[sanddrag]

Okay here's the situation. In a certain class of mine one of the regular assignments is a study guide for the chapter. You must write the vocabluary term or question and the answer to each of about 40 items from the chapter. This study guide is worth 40 points (1 point per question/vocab term) in the class grade. Now, here comes the part I want you to give an opinion on.

If a mistake is made such as misspelling a word and crossing it out, no credit is given for the entire question/vocab term. Is this fair? So not attempting it at all gives the same credit as doing it and making one little mistake.

But it's more than that.

If a question, answer, or both are missing from the assignment or the answer is incorrect, double the value of the question (2 points) is subtracted from the score of the assignment.

Now, the controversy in this is that theoretically a student who does not do the assignment would receive a grade of -80. The teacher claims there is no such thing as a negative grade, the lowest a person can receive on an assignment is zero. So okay fine, you would receive zero out of 40 for not doing the assignment.

Now picure this. You do 20 questions of the 40 question assignment. You did not do 20 of the 40 questions, resulting in a 2 point reduction for each meaning you receive a score of zero for the assignment. Completing half the assignment earns the exact same grade as not doing the assignment at all. This would be promoting laziness in that there is no incentive to do any less than half the assignment. If a student doesn't do at least half, he might as well not do it at all.

Because of this fact, let's suppose the teacher didn't really mean to say the lowest score possible was zero and that there a negative score was indeed possible so there would be some incentive for doing any portion of the assignment. A person who honestly just did not do the assignment would receive the lowest possible score which would be -80 out of 40. My school's policy on cheating is that if cheat, you get a "double zero" for the assignment meaning you get a zero out of twice the value of the assignment. In this case that would be 0/80. The score of 0/80 is a far better score than -80/40 so in essence the teacher would be cheating. Is this not true?

Last, if an answer does not contain all of the required parts to it, it is labled as "sparse" and -3 is given for that question.

The bottom line is how can a teacher take away more points for not doing something, than the points he gives for doing the same something?

I know that points have nothing to do with the fundamentals of education but the math in it seems purely illogical to me.

What do you all think of this?