In Which I Start to Reveal My Evil Side to My Students

Today a calculus student emailed me. She collaborated with a friend in the class on the "problem set" (which consisted of two moderately-hard homework problems from the textbook -- a far cry from what you might imagine a problem set for a real calculus class), and they both turned in identical answers. However, as they are in different sections of the course, they turned these problem sets in to different TAs.

You know where this is going, right?

One student got a low score on the problem set, and the other got a high score. The low-scoring student emailed me to whine that it was so unfair. (Did I mention that this problem set counts for less than 1% of the overall grade in the course?) The low-scoring student didn't make any claims about her responses being correct and error-free with points mistakenly taken off through careless grading.

My response? I thanked her for bringing this to my attention. I said that clearly this meant that the other TA was being too generous with the grading and that if she'd tell me who it was, I'd tell him/her to be stricter with the grading on the next assignment.

I've heard nothing back.