ABSTRACT
Because students often compare workloads among professors and courses, especially among different sections of the same course, there may be subtle or overt pressure to match workloads and expectations with colleagues. And, the student evaluations may suffer if students perceive the workloads or grading standards as more difficult than the peers'. For students considering taking the course, the word on the street is that a person is a very difficult instructor and a person's course carries an inappropriately rough workload. There are forces at work that may unintentionally pit people against their students, to cause them to forget that their students are not their enemies. Students may be increasingly objectified as misaligned with the educational enterprise as a whole, when they are in fact simply unaware of why people hold them to the standards they do, and how they will benefit from them.
