Lecturer: Sympathy vs. Ethics

Being a lecturer (or teacher) is not an easy job. In fact, all other jobs also have their own challenges. Above all, we as Muslims should regard all those duties as amanah from Allah, because all of us would be answerable to Him later. We may escape from any punishment or implication on any of our offense/misconduct in this world (because people may just ignore it), but not from His judgment.

When someone, say a student, asks me for something that they really need due to certain reason (but he doesn't deserve it), of course as human being I feel like I have to assist them. But again, the question is, "is that assistance considered ethical and fair?" or "Am I practicing justice, particularly to other students, by helping him/her?"



Good intention alone is not enough, but it must be through good and permissible action too. In this case, I cant simply help the students (by giving some extra credits) based on sympathy, or because I know him/her very well.

Whatever the result is, accept it as something that you deserve to have, because Allah would never be unfair to His servants. If it's good, it means He wants to educate us on how to be thankful to Him (and continue to strive). If it's not good, that means He wants to educate us to work harder in the future, to give the best that we can, not to take things for granted, and only put hope in Him alone.

Generally, grades given by lecturers are normally more that what the students deserve (based on their performance throughout the semester, i.e. carry marks + final exam). If lecturers strictly follow the grading scheme of the university in evaluating the students, I believe that the results would be worse. Well, that's my own opinion.

Of course, human being evaluate others mostly based on end results. We don't have the capability to evaluate every single steps taken towards the end. Only Allah possesses that Superior Knowledge & Capability. So don't worry, He would always calculate whatever steps, efforts & sweats that we have sacrificed towards the end. And that should always be the motivation for us to strive at our best.