The problem is that the university says the grade was “arbitrary” without ever explaining how. They haven’t said the rubric was violated, they haven’t shown that similar papers were graded differently, and they haven’t pointed to any standard the instructor ignored. They’ve just asserted the conclusion. In academic terms, a grade is arbitrary when it’s untethered from criteria. Here, the criterion was engaging the course material using the discipline’s methods. Substituting Bible verses for psychological analysis doesn’t meet that standard. If Oklahoma believes a zero was inappropriate, they owe a clearer explanation than a vague label, because right now “arbitrary” sounds less like an academic finding and more like an administrative retreat under pressure.
It’s possible that the instructor didn’t follow her own rubric and that’s what made the zero look vindictive and improper. If the assignment required certain elements and she tossed the whole paper in the trash instead of grading it against all of the stated criteria, then that's another issue.
When I was in the seminary, I recall a similar concept arising.
I had a professor explicitly say that when exegeting a particular passage, you DON'T say "it can't mean X because that would contradict this other doctrine over here that I already believe." Which leads to this amusing story.
I was in third semester Greek (my prof's PhD was from Sheffield in the UK), and more than once we'd discussed a few points, and while our doctrine was unquestionably SIMILAR, he would say things to the class when looking at the Greek such as, "But you can't assume the first century person reading this even knew about this other letter by a different author."
We were discussing Mark 1:8 and the concept in Greek of a phrase that has the preposition en plus a dative case noun and the overall concept. He referenced another passage, so I made the mistake of being a smart aleck.
"Yes, but what if you didn't have (passage he referenced)?"
After all, this was the same guy who had taught us to think that way all semester.
He walks over and opens my Greek text to another page and says, "Well, you have it right here so let's go on." The entire class erupted laughing, and I actually thought it was a really good zinger myself. But to his credit, he DID apologize for it, saying he wasn't trying to embarrass me but we had to move on quickly to the next concept.
I even told him, "Hey, if I were you, I'd have done the same thing."
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