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.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad