I'll fill in some more details of this story since some people seem interested. This was in 1989 so a fairly long time ago. I had started the PhD physics programme at Rutgers University and I had just started as a TA. I had 90 students in three classes doing experimental classes in simple physics, what was taught in the UK at the time as "O-Level" physics to fourteen-to-sixteen year old schoolchildren. The students were mostly "pre-meds" along with other things like food scientists.

I'll call this student "Kylie". After one or two classes, at the end of the class, I would find Kylie, a very attractive tanned girl in quite revealing shorts and sleeveless top, was curled up in a ball scribbling away on her answer sheet. Everyone else had left the classroom but Kylie was apparently beavering away, working very hard. I went up to her and asked her what she was doing. She was writing out the answer, which looked perfectly correct, but then erasing it all and rewriting it, again and again, and she sort of twinkled at me and said "What do I have to do to get an A in this class?"

We'd been warned about all kinds of trouble in the class but I at first simply assumed that Kylie was a diligent student who wanted an A grade, so I started telling her that the class was quite straightforward and just do the work and you can easily get an A and so on. After all this explanation, Kylie turned to me again and said "What do I need to do to get an A in this class?", completely ignoring all my heartfelt advice on academic success. I repeated myself, and then Kylie decided to depart at last, but it certainly seemed to be a bit odd.

Next week and the same thing happened, and then the next week, and at this point I started to say to Kylie "I have to get the bus home after the class, so can you try to finish a bit earlier this week?" Some of the young men in the class then overheard me and started to make fun of Kylie's late departures, and Kylie got into a huff at this point and gave up on her appeals.

At the end of the course, I had to enter all the student's grades into the computer system and then it would automatically calculate the final grade using a "grading curve". I had not actually paid any attention to how well Kylie was doing since I was teaching a total of 90 people, including Beavis and Butthead and various other "characters". Kylie had been a pretty minor problem compared to some of them. One student actually tried to physically intimidate me into improving his grade.

The biggest surprise was that Kylie had achieved a B+ grade in the course, just short of an A grade. I'm sure she could have got the A if she had made just slightly more effort, and she'd spent quite an amount of time in the classroom just writing and then erasing her words.

At the end of that semester I left Rutgers, since the teaching workload was absolutely ridiculous, and for some reason or another a large number of the other beginning graduate students had been completely excused teaching duties.