First time teaching an 8am class this past semester, and three students in particular had a tough time making it to class. They kind of realized this near the end of the semester and started bargaining with me. I'm absurdly soft when it comes to stuff like this, because being a hard-ass in this particular context is actually a lot of work. So, I let them bargain, primarily turning in a bunch of late work (with penalty) as long as they got it to me with enough time to evaluate before final grades were due.

One of the above students took this as a real come to Jesus moment and showed up without fail after said bargaining, got all of his stuff to me when he said he would, and redeemed himself with a "C" in the class.

The other two kept pushing for more accomodations, which I granted or declined exactly according to my convenience. When it all shook out, one of these two ended up turning in most of his work (missing one small paper) and actually ended up with a "C" as well. The other one was missing two of the small papers and got a "D".

Yesterday, got a flurry of emails from the last student complaining about his "D". He claimed that he turned in the same amount of work as his friend and therefore deserved the same grade. Implicit in this suggestion is that he and his pal collaborated on their work, which is technically cheating and which I strongly suspected but didn't really have enough evidence to bother pursuing*. You can't make a claim to deserve an identical grade to another student unless you know your work was really similar to theirs.

Anyhow, I pointed out that he was missing two key papers, which explained his low grade. He claimed he turned them in via email, which I allowed as part of the above negotiations. I scoured my inbox and spam and trash - nothing. He then emailed me screenshots which he claimed proved he had sent them, but which actually showed that he had accidentally emailed them to himself. I called him on it, and he replied with a largely nonsensical explanation of why I was misreading the screenshots that and what basically amounted to an admission to that error and a plea for some kind of "at least I tried" help.

Blessedly, I don't have any control over my grades once they've been submitted. Even if I were inclined to give him what he wants, I don't actually have the power to do it. But I referred him to the college administration and apparently he's pursuing the matter.

Fucking... sigh. I really enjoy teaching and it makes me happy to be able to be flexible with students that are trying to fit in college classes with their regular life responsibilities. Particularly if they are taking a class like mine, that isn't tacked in a clear way to any future employment prospects. But this whole stupid mess could have been avoided if I just had a policy of inflexibility up front. Nobody asks for any special consideration. Nobody receives any special consideration. And I don't have students trying to flip my attempts to be decent back on me.

Truthfully, I don't really care whether this guy gets a "C" or a "D" in the class. So if push comes to shove, I'll definitely choose the path of least resistance. But I definitely don't like being told what to do, particularly by people who are just trying to game the system. At this point, I'm hoping that I can come up with a late-work policy going forward that:

a)helps students who genuinely need it
b)excludes students who want to take advantage
c)doesn't expose me to nonsense like this
d)doesn't require me to individually evaluate every students' excuse - which I've accidentally discovered from students who have assumed I have a hard policy on this matter means dealing with a lot of weird and unnecessarily disclosive medical information. I've gotten emails with unsolicited X-Rays before.

*if you're noticing a trend here, that I'm kind of lazy about a lot of the administrative parts of my job, then good eye. One of the more irritating thing about absurdly low adjunct wages is the relatively high compensation for college administrators - particularly when more and more of their duties seem to fall onto my plate every single year. Catching a student teaching and, honestly, failing a student at all, is a lot of paperwork and in the case of the former, meetings. I don't get paid enough to be a detective.

I imagine it takes a lot of patience (like the kind you exhibited here) to put up with such an array of personalities, especially those in the college context who are simultaneously finding themselves/growing up, and entitled or have a chip of their shoulder. Can't be easy, so I give you and all educators a ton of credit.

I teach at a Community College, so I get kids with a pretty huge variety of prior educational experience. I know (because they've told me) that being flexible on some stuff while they learn to balance being a grownup and taking classes (in a way that students in four year schools don't necessarily have to) has been really helpful and important to them. I'm just hoping that this doesn't work out so ugly that I'm tempted to substantially adjust that.

That way you can appear to be reasonable (and you are) and at the same time put the responsibility 100% on the student.

Some examples: Accept late work with 30 points off for each day late

Dropping the lowest assignment grade

3 allowed absences for whatever reason. After that, points taken off for non excused reasons

By giving the students an opportunity to remedy the problem on their own, it relieves quite a bit of the requests for individualized care.
And it gives you something to point to when those students who want special rules inevitably ask.

Just make it very clear what the rules are. Emphasize that they are there to help the students and that you are inflexible in enforcing them due to fairness

>Some examples: Accept late work with 30 points off for each
>day late
>
>Dropping the lowest assignment grade
>
>3 allowed absences for whatever reason. After that, points
>taken off for non excused reasons

Good stuff. Thanks.

The other one I think I desperately need is a hard, fast absolute drop-dead date for late work. The part of this that I know I screwed up is being willing to accept work so close to when the actual grades are due - so if he were worried about his stuff finding me, we'd have had an opportunity to work it out.

Or did that come out during the negotiations?

I think that taking a hard initial stance and being willing to go flexible on it (usually) works nicely because it encourages them to have to talk to me about their late work and not just hand it in whenever, but actually commit to "I will have this to you by this date".

In his case, I gave him a hard deadline that he agreed to - but the issue wasn't that the two papers in question were late. It's that he never got them to me at all. Really, his argument (if he continues to pursue this) will come down to one of two things:

a)Student claiming (falsely, it appears) that I had some problem receiving email on my end, even though he was successfully corresponding with me via email just the day before

or

b)Student claiming that his unsuccessful attempt (because he put the wrong address on the "to:" line) to send me an email should be close enough.

If the school administration ends up weighing in on this, I will reasonably accept the criticism that I need to hold to some harder lines to avoid stuff like this. That's fair. I won't accept any implication that I mishandled work that he submitted on time, because the screenshots that he pretended were evidence actually suggest the opposite - that he sent them to the wrong address. In short, "a" is a lie and I can't accept it. "B" would be pretty weak and risks exposing opening up a Pandora's box of a lot of ambiguity at each semester's end for all professors, not just me. But if they said "he tried. grade his stuff." then it actually wouldn't be the worst shit sandwich I've eaten for a job, and so I'd eat this one.

Yeah, that upfront like you said gives everyone the same rules leaves out the wiggle room.

That kid trying to play you with that weak ass attempt on the screen shot is a bad hail mary from him.

I was like "that's his address in the 'to:' line, right? I'm not interpreting this incorrectly?"

That actually happens to me once and awhile when I use Outlook for school emails. And it's actually incredibly subtle when it bounces back into your own inbox, so I can totally see how he made the mistake. But I can't let that be my problem.

as they do on negotiating their grades they would get A’s

I'm really incredibly easy. All this lawyering HAS to be harder than just showing up, turning in your work, and getting a (pretty inevitable) "B" or "A" in my class.

You had up until that point to turn everything in but if you didn't after that date you were done.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

I would laugh so hard in their face.

... because my fear would be 30 students turning in a semester's worth of work all at once. But yeah, an absolute drop-dead date for late work is a good idea. And I can justify it in a way that makes sense for them to: it gives me time to grade it, return it, and have them use that evaluation to see how I grade.

fellow student...and if hes going to factor that in when he takes it up the chain..

What's he going to say? "I know I deserve an identical grade as my friend because we did all of our work together."

Their work isn't literally identical - just almost certainly the result of a level of collaboration that the school would probably regard as cheating. Ironically, the kid who's beefing with his grade was a stronger writer and made his points more clearly on the work he did turn in and on the final exam. He'd have been fine if he'd gotten me his work.

I don't have any direct evidence of them cheating, but if he pushes too hard on that line of argumentation then he's at a real risk of admitting to it.

Sounds like some shit I would have done back in those days.

This kinda reminds me of when I had to plead to a C or take an F

The material in a psychoanalysis class I took was convoluted and shitty, so I opted to do my own research (risky move #1) using straightforward sources on the history of psychoanalysis and it's concepts (vs. the very exhausting and batshit crazy case studies)

The professor asked if I plagiarized, saying 'my paper was too good'. I replied that all my sources were cited and that writing itself was not plagiarized. She asked for me to turn in my sources so she could analyze them, hoping to catch me lifting from them. I happily turned over my sources, but when it came to meeting with the Dean, the professor said she didn't have time to review my sources and so I would be given the choice of either taking an arbitrary 'C', or failing the course.

I thought it was criminal how they railroaded me at the time, but had I just used the sources the professor provided for the class, I would have avoided all the accusations to begin with, despite probably hating the subject twice as much at the end of the semester.

Not self email (what is this, amateur hour? lol)

But sending an email with a corrupt file attachment. That way you can claim you turned it in, but something messed up in the process that was totally out of your hands.
That will buy them a few days to continue working on it.

>Not self email (what is this, amateur hour? lol)

I can assure you that this is, indeed, amateur hour.

>But sending an email with a corrupt file attachment. That way
>you can claim you turned it in, but something messed up in the
>process that was totally out of your hands.
>That will buy them a few days to continue working on it.

This one happens about once a year. A student submits an email with a bad file. It sits at the bottom of my "to grade" priority list for as long as it takes me to get to. And then I reply and assume a good faith mistake even if I know better. They sit on that reply for a day or so while they complete the assignment and then get back to me with "Oh no. I'm so sorry I screwed that up. Please let me know if this file works."

I appreciate that hustle because everybody respects each others' intelligence. This guy is breaking the written rules AND the unwritten ones.

It was due the final day. I went to go take it to the prof who wasn't there that day so i slipped it under the door

i get a letter maybe 4 weeks later saying i have to come in and talk to the Dean and i'd gotten an F in the class.

My mom couldn't take me since her ride got repossessed in the middle of the night. i had to call my dad. Me, him, grandma, and my two cousins all loaded up into a van and drove all the way to the school for me to save my college career. i felt ultra guilty the whole time

so we get there and i'm waiting to see the dean. the first person i run into is the prof, who had apparently left for the summer that day and never actually saw the paper. He actually went out of his way to get my grade rolled back up to a C.

I was still pretty salty at the time, but had i done the work i was supposed to, it could have been avoided, obviously.

Glad the professor realized the issue and got it fixed without too much back and forth

And i believe this was Southern Lit

So i’m sure he figured a paper shouldn’t derail my whole career. He seemed pretty psyched that i had actually done the paper

>My mom couldn't take me since her ride got repossessed in the
>middle of the night. i had to call my dad. Me, him, grandma,
>and my two cousins all loaded up into a van and drove all the
>way to the school for me to save my college career. i felt
>ultra guilty the whole time

This is why I try to be as flexible as possible. I was in graduate school for an amount of time that I'm totally uncomfortable admitting in public, and I never would have finished if it weren't for the occasional professor acknowledging the obvious fact that sometimes shit happens and that, ultimately, school isn't the real world so maybe we should give each other a break once and awhile.

Good on your family though. I'm impressed.

>so we get there and i'm waiting to see the dean. the first
>person i run into is the prof, who had apparently left for the
>summer that day and never actually saw the paper. He actually
>went out of his way to get my grade rolled back up to a C.

Good on him for standing up. Running as far and fast away from campus as soon as your grading obligations are done is, from my view, a completely understandable reaction. But he's got to make sure nobody falls through the cracks as a result.

>I was still pretty salty at the time, but had i done the work
>i was supposed to, it could have been avoided, obviously.

>The professor asked if I plagiarized, saying 'my paper was too
>good'.

Ughhhhhhh. I can't lie. I've had this reaction to a paper before, but "too good" is just a red flag. Not proof. There's a creepily lucrative business in plagiarism-identifying software for professors that exists for this purpose. I kind of hate that it exists, but in order to say that I do my due diligence- anytime I suspect something, I just pick a particularly well-written line in a paper, google it, and see if anything pops up.

As a weird side note, this is how I discovered a pretty fun demographic of student. Kids from other countries who aren't native English speakers and are therefore not very confident talking at length in class, but who, as a result of their efforts to learn English and the increased confidence that comes from taking the time to craft your own writing have (and use) INCREDIBLY impressive vocabularies in papers. It took me a few semesters to realize this was a thing, but I see it with regularity - a student of absolutely unknowable intelligence in classroom discussion who drops SAT words by the dozens in their totally unplagiarized papers.

>I replied that all my sources were cited and that
>writing itself was not plagiarized. She asked for me to turn
>in my sources so she could analyze them, hoping to catch me
>lifting from them. I happily turned over my sources, but when
>it came to meeting with the Dean, the professor said she
>didn't have time to review my sources and so I would be given
>the choice of either taking an arbitrary 'C', or failing the
>course.


And double ughhh. That's not part of the deal. She can pursue the issue or not pursue the issue. You don't get to be too busy to uncover cheating AND make students suffer for suspected cheating. I'm sorry that happened to you.

>I thought it was criminal how they railroaded me at the time,
>but had I just used the sources the professor provided for the
>class, I would have avoided all the accusations to begin with,
>despite probably hating the subject twice as much at the end
>of the semester.

Eh. You were right to call it risky, but only if the professor is both extremely rigid AND extremely lazy. I warn students about going off-book for their research, but the objective of any of these classes is to get students to initiate and follow through on their own research. Like, that's the fucking point.

>As a weird side note, this is how I discovered a pretty fun
>demographic of student. Kids from other countries who aren't
>native English speakers and are therefore not very confident
>talking at length in class, but who, as a result of their
>efforts to learn English and the increased confidence that
>comes from taking the time to craft your own writing have (and
>use) INCREDIBLY impressive vocabularies in papers. It took me
>a few semesters to realize this was a thing, but I see it with
>regularity - a student of absolutely unknowable intelligence
>in classroom discussion who drops SAT words by the dozens in
>their totally unplagiarized papers.

There's a guy I can barely understand from China (well, I have picked up on his accent and can understand him better now), but his emails are INCREDIBLE... not only his ability to communicate technical issues, but the 'voice' i.e. conversational aspects of the writing, humor, etc. It's really impressive and I totally get how that experience would initially lead someone grading a paper to raise an eyebrow.

>And double ughhh. That's not part of the deal. She can pursue
>the issue or not pursue the issue. You don't get to be too
>busy to uncover cheating AND make students suffer for
>suspected cheating. I'm sorry that happened to you.

Man the Dean bailed her out. On some 'hey the professor ain't got time for all this'. I get how you protect your professors first, especially at a huge school where the students are basically statistics.

>Eh. You were right to call it risky, but only if the professor
>is both extremely rigid AND extremely lazy. I warn students
>about going off-book for their research, but the objective of
>any of these classes is to get students to initiate and follow
>through on their own research. Like, that's the fucking
>point.

She was lazy, but being that she was a practicing psychoanalyst with what I sensed were her own emotional issues, I think the 'C' was the only way for the Dean to let her save face and let the student take the L (I guess I was supposed to be grateful that they didn't pursue the plagiarism accusations further)

>She was lazy, but being that she was a practicing
>psychoanalyst with what I sensed were her own emotional
>issues,

Ha. Oh dear.

>I think the 'C' was the only way for the Dean to let
>her save face and let the student take the L (I guess I was
>supposed to be grateful that they didn't pursue the plagiarism
>accusations further)

Yuck. Though it makes internal sense when you describe it this way. I'm faculty and students aren't part of our tribe. To take a selfish point away from your story (sorry) I strongly suspect that my situation will resolve itself because of this and not because I was actually right. Result is the same, but the former makes me feel gross.

Gets them ready for the world of at-will employment

>Yuck. Though it makes internal sense when you describe it this
>way. I'm faculty and students aren't part of our tribe. To
>take a selfish point away from your story (sorry) I strongly
>suspect that my situation will resolve itself because of this
>and not because I was actually right. Result is the same, but
>the former makes me feel gross.

life is not a soft and forgiving teacher.. the sooner one figures that out the sooner one can get serious about it.

hit with that "tough titty" better luck next time champ..

It's a delicate balance of being firm but reasonable

Shit, I even got the chili pepper on Ratemyprofessor before I started getting fatter and balder. Once you've got that, it means a student has to actively go in and take it away. Passivity with respect to my attractiveness means the chili pepper stays.

I know a lot of professors who do that, and now that I've been burned by somebody trying to take advantage of my generosity maybe it'll happen to me as well. But for now, I can't bring myself to do it. The first class I taught at this school, I had a student from Pakistan who found on the day of the final exam that several of his family members had been killed in the 2014 Peshawar school massacre. Being able to say "maybe you don't need to answer questions about the difference between Secularization and Rational Choice Theory today" felt like exercising my responsibility, not abandoning it.

But I get it either way. No knock on hardass professors at all.

i keep tying to convince my students that grades don't matter. meeting goals matters a ton, and learning matters a lot, but our grades are shitty ways of measuring that.

i'd feel differently if the grading scales allowed for meaningful evaluation...but as it is, there are too many unwritten rules and assumptions.

i know i learned by far the most in my life (and got the best feedback) during my freshman year of college (everything was pass/fail but we received shadow grades) and in my honors seminars (there were grades but they didn't matter because you needed a decent gpa to get in and the honors examination/recommendations were more relevant for phd programs).

>i keep tying to convince my students that grades don't
>matter. meeting goals matters a ton, and learning matters a
>lot, but our grades are shitty ways of measuring that.

Fucking... precisely. I'm not some fluffy hippie about grades. I just don't think the way they're shaped offer a useful view of students' command of the material or progress.

So yeah, keep telling them that. Maybe it'll catch on.

Right now, his strategy seems to be to use his absolutely shocking lack of awareness to his advantage.

In my last email response, I told him that I didn't think his situation warranted a grade change but that he was free to discuss an appeal with his academic advisor and school administration and that I would happily abide by their decision.

He seems to have taken that as an indication that I absolutely wanted to change his grade but didn't know how. So, he responded with instructions on how to fill out the grade change form. I replied to clarify my position:

a)I don't believe that you deserve a grade change based on the evidence you sent

b)I have bosses. If you think "a" is unfair, take it up with them because I'm not going to change my mind based on your arguments.

For those of you who chimed in and said nice things about being a community college professor and rightfully scorned this doofus - thanks. As most of you (and I have too, explicitly) identified, I'm a huge softy in how I run my class. Until now, I've literally never regretted that. The real world is absolutely brutal, but a community college religion class isn't the real world - and I only get paid to teach people about religion. Life lessons are almost always more work for me.

I can see this spiraling into anti-climax where I just exchange a bunch of emails restating my position and he eventually gives up. It's like playing ping pong with my dad when I was a kid - he knew that I was an uncoordinated little idiot so he just tried to blandly return all of my shots until I screwed something up. Always worked.

I guess the good news is that he seems to have abandoned the tactic of pretending that my email somehow malfunctioned. Hilariously, that doesn't mean fully copping to the sent-an-email-to-myself mistake, but instead he's characterizing it as some sort of mystery. Just not a mystery that's my fault any longer.

So, at the moment this will play out in one of the following ways:

a)He just gives up. He's been incredibly tenacious about emailing me, but not about actually doing anything effective. I can re-state my position over and over again, but I'm not going to fill out grade change paperwork until somebody above me (which is a lot of people as I'm desperately unimportant) tells me that I have to.

b)He gets his shit together to appeal to the correct people and the appeal is either accepted or rejected. I'm actually more indifferent to this than you'd think. The principle that I'm protecting isn't some sense of grade integrity - it's my right to close the book on a class once the semester is completed and not have constantly moving deadlines on grades being due. Grading is the absolute worst, and finishing it each semester feels amazing. Whether he gets a "C" or a "D" is way less important to me than the ability each semester to look at a date and say "that's it. that's the day I'll be done."

real hope now is whittling away at your resolve until you change the grade to shut him up. I think it shows that fundamentally he is unwilling & scared to run this up the chain, and despite his seeming lack of awareness, I think he gets that your accommodations have already been what any higher-ups would deem to be generous if it comes down to a open discussion between all parties.

The books are not opened to account for mysteries of emails that end up in the Bermuda Triangle.

Or maybe he really is dumb enough to take it up with management.

Given your description that he is the better writer of the two students, he might feel confident enough in his ability to make a shoddy case sound solid, but I doubt it.

>Or maybe he really is dumb enough to take it up with
>management.

After sending me screenshots that literally proved himself wrong, this would be pretty on-brand. I'm really antsy about this whole thing already, so this would be a hilarious conclusion. Honestly, I'd be fine losing any appeal if I actually got to watch him explain the whole situation.

>Given your description that he is the better writer of the two
>students, he might feel confident enough in his ability to
>make a shoddy case sound solid, but I doubt it.

Oh yeah, an update on that. I don't know how to explain why his final exam and final paper was better (excluding the obvious answer that maybe he cheated) written, but these emails he's been sending are... barely coherent. Between making sense of his arguments and sending him in the right direction to appeal his grade, I've done way more work on his behalf than he has.

Didn't understand it back then



"But now I feel ya"

I miss the kids. But tutoring routinely in LA has helped with that somewhat.

Your story reminds me of a polar opposite story from my time outside DC. A kid in my class had an F, and the mom came into open house. Open houses result in more parents questioning grades than any other time, so I'm always a bit ready with some defense when I see certain parents walk into the room. This mom said to me, in a firm tone, "Why does my son have an F?"

I said, maybe a bit more indignantly than I needed, "Well, he hasn't turned in homework assignments, he's refused to participate in class, he doesn't do any work during group projects, and instead of doing the mid-term, he put his head down and took a nap."

She processed this for about a second or two. She nodded her head and said, "That would do it." She then stood up and walked out of the room. I never heard from her again.

And they turned in better work than I'd ever seen before. It's tempting to be grouchier than usual because this has turned into a big pain in my ass during a (brief) break before my summer classes start up. But I tried to chill out yesterday by emailing a couple kids to congratulate them for writing such good papers. That helped.


>She processed this for about a second or two. She nodded her
>head and said, "That would do it." She then stood up and
>walked out of the room. I never heard from her again.

Oof. Never hearing from her again is a bit of a bummer, but that list of classroom deficiencies is probably something she needed to iron out with her son, not with her son AND you.

He ran it up the chain, which is a surprising amount of initiative for a student who could barely be bothered to show up all semester. If he'd put as much effort into my easy-ass class as he did in pretending to be a lawyer after the course was finished, he'd probably have done pretty well.

Our division dean was pretty supportive and was happy to back me if I decided not to change his grade, but also strongly advised that I could be in for a lot of bullshit. We both agreed that this dummy, at the very least, did intend to send his paper to me when he actually sent it to himself. And apparently I put myself at risk because I accepted his friend (the one he was "collaborating" with on his papers) at seven minutes after the deadline I gave them both. That detail turned out to be way more important to her than I expected. I noted his friend's late submission with an eyeroll and a "close enough" because it arrived while I was at my other job and there wasn't any real difference in how much of a pain it was if it arrived at 7:00pm or 7:07pm.

Her view was mostly informed by wanting this guy out of both of our hair. She admitted there's a real difference between me accepting a submission seven minutes late and me not accepting a submission that somebody only INTENDED to submit seven minutes late. But that if he kept running it up the chain, I'd probably have to explain that difference over and over again to people who were increasingly unsympathetic.

So, I graded his (predictably terrible) work and he got a "C" instead of a "D". This is going to sound weak, but I'm actually fine doing that because my boss more or less told me to as long as I didn't do it because the kid told me to. I was super worried that I was going to crack on this, so getting highroaded is preferable.

And yes, I have now officially re-written my "late work" policy. Any future doofuses that need me to be generous because of real life circumstances out of their control may end up getting the shaft because this dummy couldn't figure out how to send an email. Hooray.

He was generally a pushover growing up (less so, now) but he felt justified in really pushing his case against one professor.

She said she'd be accepting final papers during her office hours but she left her office maybe 15 minutes early. My friend shows up just before her office hours are supposed to end and she's nowhere to be found. I believe he just slipped it under her door or put it in her mailbox... either way, he didn't have any kind of proof that he submitted on time.

Fast forward a couple weeks and he gets a much worse grade than he expected so he goes in to see the professor. She says there's no proof he submitted on time... he says she wasn't there so what option did he have? She said there was nothing he could do but he was persistent and kept pleading his case.

Finally she was like "FINE.. FINE! I'll give you a C! I dunno why you students feel like you can just come inhere and berate us into changing grades" and starts crying! My friend feels like shit... but he's also earned himself a passing grade in the class.

Fast forward almost a decade and my friend is a practicing emergency room doctor. He's looking over his roster of patients at the beginning of his shift and vaguely recognizes a name. He starts thinking and is like "Nah... it couldn't be" but goes to check and, yep, it's his old professor.

He introduces himself and says "Hello, I'm Dr. So and So. You may not remember me but I took one of your classes in college." Her eyes get big as she suddenly recognizes him... she grabs at her husband nearby and says "It's HIM!!!!". The husband says "Who!??!"... she says "The student I used to tell you about"... the husband "The one that made you cry!??!"

No punches were thrown lol. They all shared a laugh reminiscing about their different perspectives. My friend explained how he felt like shit for what he did but he felt he had to fight for his grade. She talked about the pressure you teachers face at times and how the incident with him had stuck with her... but she was happy to see that he'd done something great with his education.

The part where she leaves before office hours are done and then holds students responsible for that is tough to identify with. Actually, so is the part where the student becomes a doctor. I don't teach anything scientific but I'm still pretty sure I don't want this kid performing any medical procedure on me.

Nice to hear things work out, though. That was kind of crazy.

It seems like most professors are either zero tolerance or extra lenient.

I was in a Thermodynamics class with my college roommate and he was crushing the curve ... 95% on the first test when the average was 30%... 92% on the 2nd test when the average was 20%.

The professor said he'd take the best 2 scores on the tests and throw out the remaining test. So my roommate coasted into the last test and scored like 52% against an average score of 50%.

He was dumbfounded when he didn't get an A for the course. He went to the professor and was told that it was the best 2 tests *collectively*, not individually, so one of his 90%'s got thrown out! My roommate tried to argue with the prof but the prof wouldn't budge.

The fact that he grubbed so hard for a C makes me kind of pissed.

The one interesting thing I found out from my boss was that, in most cases, a "C" is transferable and a "D" isn't. Probably 80% of my students are taking my class to get humanities credits they can use when they transfer to a four year college.

who deserve failing grades because it makes my wife look like she isn't a competent teacher.

Somewhere in these last 10 or so years these kids have realized they have power. The colleges don't want to deal with the paperwork or negative feedback and more work so they end up bending if a student puts pressure on them.

It sucks. My wife had a nightmare scenario her first year teaching in grad school at Temple. A kid went up the chain of command and that incident has made her record keeping impeccable ever since.

These kids can't remember anything from the class or syllabus but they damn sure know every rule in the college handbook.

>Somewhere in these last 10 or so years these kids have
>realized they have power. The colleges don't want to deal with
>the paperwork or negative feedback and more work so they end
>up bending if a student puts pressure on them.

Sounds about right. We're in education until grades are due. Then we're in customer service.

>It sucks. My wife had a nightmare scenario her first year
>teaching in grad school at Temple. A kid went up the chain of
>command and that incident has made her record keeping
>impeccable ever since.

I hate that. Sorry. That's pretty much where this story ends for me too. I am ... not great at administrative stuff. But I'm keeping track of *everything* and, unfortunately, have to be way harsher on extended deadlines and stuff because of this.

>These kids can't remember anything from the class or syllabus
>but they damn sure know every rule in the college handbook.

Uh huh. And you sit there asking yourself "how was this LESS effort than just doing the work?" As I've said a couple times here, I'm really, really easy. I can count the number of students who've gotten below a "B" even though they've turned everything in on one hand.