No one in Gene Woolsey's class made spelling errors

I wished I had a chance to take Gene Woolsey's class. Woolsey was a major personality in Operations Research, and from reading a set of remembrances in ORMS Today (June 2015), I learned that he was also an amazing teacher. And no one in his class made spelling errors! How cool is that. Well, I don't know if no one ever made a spelling error but I bet that the frequency of typos was much lower than usual. The INFORMS obituary is here.

The ORMS Today article contains an amusing passage about his Statistical Consulting class, starting with:

The class had a dress code: a suit or equivalent attire for presenting a project to the CEO of an organization or a three-star general (or higher).

and my favorite (my bolding):

To emphasize the importance of presenting your work professionally, each spelling or grammatical error dropped your assignment mark by one letter grade.

In case the reader does not feel the gravity of the situation, the author, a former student, elaborates:

It really drove the lesson home when you saw an "A" on your paper scratched out and replaced with a "C" because of two spelling errors.

Next time I mark a paper that contains multiple typos and errors, I might need to pull a Woolsey!

 

Comments

[Will Parker]

I was one of Dr. Woolsey's students from 2002-2003, just before he retired as a full time professor. His attention to detail was legendary, and it wasn't just spelling. In our Industrial Psychology course, we were required to pour over all the details of his case studies that he assigned every week prior to our presentation the next week. This included looking over the entirety of the case study documentation, and "interviews" with the key players involved. The interviews were with Woolsey who was playing the part of the person you were interviewing. The interviews were legendary, and his responses to questions both in character and out of character were priceless.

Woolsey of course knew the details of each inside and out, either because he was part of the case or knew some or all the key players. He knew the motivations, personalities, relationship statuses of all the players. He also had all the back story, not just what was in the documentation. In some cases, the documentation lied to you. You had to carefully and thoughtfully interview the participants in order to get the full picture.

If you spent anything less than 40 hours on a given week's case, you were not going to do well in the presentation. Nor would you do well in the write-up. This included spelling errors, although in his later years, he became a bit more relaxed, and a spelling error or two was often forgiven.

[Kaiser]

Will: Thanks for the first-person perspective. You're lucky to have a great prof!