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PhilGoetz comments on A philosophy professor elicits college students' reactions to Less Wrong - Less Wrong Discussion
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When I was an undergraduate, I had many professors who were open to debate and encouraged students to disagree with them. I had 2 professors (Keith Gallagher and some Jesuit theologian whose name I forget) who responded negatively to disagreement from their students. I received As and Bs in every other class, but Cs in classes from those 2 professors, seriously damaging my GPA.
So, it only takes a small number of such professors, to make the rational decision by a student be to always agree with the professor.
Sorry, Gallagher is a CS professor. How could he have graded you poorly for disagreement? I can see how that can happen in the social sciences or humanities but it isn't clear to me what that would even mean for a CS prof.
It's not as if all CS classes have to use objective standards of grading.
It's also not the case that objective standards of grading can't be gamed.
It's also, also not the case that objective standards of grading exist beyond, say, multiple-choice exams, which are more or less useless for testing practical knowledge.
My confusion is more how one can disagree with someone in a CS class given that almost every issue is pretty objective.
Whether a program or a proof is "correct" is fairly objective. But there's a couple places where subjectivity enters in.
In practice, there are important mitigating factors. Big lower-division or required upper-division undergraduate courses are autograded as much as possible, reducing subjectivity. Elective upper-level and graduate courses tend to give As to everybody anyway, since the professors want to keep people in the class and don't want to make trouble for "their" students.
(In American universities, often there's a rough division between first-two-years (lower division) and last-two-years (upper division). Upper division classes are normally for students who've already been admitted to the major, lower division will include prospective majors as well as interested outsiders.)
There are plenty of issues to disagree over. I remember some argument over what issues were important in program efficiency. He was probably right about that. I was dismissive of the practicality of pure LISP with no extralogicals and no sequencing (no 'seq' or indexed iteration). I was probably right about that.
It didn't help that I was a bit of an arrogant twit at the time.
But, the key wasn't grading. The most important factor was his claiming, at the end of the semester, not to have received an important homework from me. I had thrown it out by then, so I couldn't prove I'd done it; and he gave me a zero on it.
This could have been accidental. But it never happened to me in any other class.
I feel you on the arrogant twit past. I stumbled across one of my old pseudonyms, call him paper-machine_2004. It was massively embarrassing.