I just saw my grade for the first exam. I did very badly and got an F. I am very surprised because I thought I did much better. I will graduate this quarter and I have to pass this class. Can I do anything to raise my grade?Distressed Student
Dear Distressed,
If you knew how many of these kinds of emails I get you'd be shocked. I'm shocked myself. If I were a student I would sooner roll over and die than ask for the kinds of favors that you kids ask of me. Have you no pride? Have you never, ever taken responsibility for anything, in your whole life? What, exactly, do you think my obligations are toward you? Do you think I care that you are graduating? I don't; your life doesn't interest me in the slightest.Angry Professor
Did you notice the curve on this test? Did you see that almost half your classmates made As and Bs? Did it strike you at all that you were one of only 5% of the students in this class who failed outright? What does this tell you? Really, please tell me how you interpret this, because I need to understand how someone could have so little awareness of how well he or she knows the material. Did you study at all? I provided you with note outlines for every lecture. Did you take notes? Did you even come to lectures? Have you done any of the reading at all?
It is clear that you have not read the syllabus. Throughout the syllabus, in class, and on WebCT I have described in elaborate, painful detail how you can get extra credit in this class. I spent probably 60 solid hours putting that syllabus together, hours expended for your benefit and not for mine. When you confess to me that you haven't even bothered to read it, I want to assault you physically. Seriously, I want to strike you over the head many, many times with my computer keyboard.
Please go away and don't bother me again. Students like you make me hate teaching.
24 comments:
PS: You don't even deserve the keystrokes I spent writing this response, but since it made me feel a little better, I'll let it slide this time.
PPS: Perhaps this concern for your grades should have surfaced earlier in the semester, when a concentrated efort on your behalf might have been helpful.
If only!
Thanks for the vicarious fanatsizing.
As I sit grading the last exam before the optional final (the final is given to students who are failing) I had to laugh out loud. These cases pain me, but there is nothing you can do.
I tell them on Day 1- "I can't want you to succeed more than you want to succeed. I do not care about your grade more than you do. If the first time you find my office is after exam 4, it is too late."
But-- guess what- today two students who have to take the final- finally found my office! Too little, too late.
Absolutely delicious!
Beautiful. You should send out something like this with only the slightest of modifications so you don't get sued or arrested.
Preach, sister, preach!
I am dealing with the same sort of mess, except our semester has just ended and I've given three F's due to plagiarism. (I outlined the whole deal on my blog, and the you-know-what continues to hit the proverbial fan.) One student called me today to ask about her F--she copy-and-pasted 70% of her research paper from the internet--and could only say, "But I'll lose my scholarship if I get an F!" and "I didn't mean to cheat!" Ugh.
Was this a real letter/e-mail you wrote to Distressed Student? If so, more power to ya, AP! You rock!
Yeah, students such as these make me hate teaching, too.
Ah, yes. I strongly dislike those students too.
Ahh, to live the fantasy.
My own fantasy is to tell the student s/he got the F the old fashioned way, s/he earned it. But, of course, I'm too whussy to word it that way.
I actually worded it that way yesterday when my plagiarism-F student called to ask why she'd failed. "You earned an F because you copy-and-pasted your paper off the internet." She was stunned. "But I didn't MEAN to cheat!" she protested.
So she *admitted* she cheated w/o realizing she had admitted it. Stupid little twit.
She really thinks I *gave* her the F because I felt like failing her.
Bardiac, I'm slowly using the word "earn" in place of "get" or "give" when discussing grades. My vocabulary's slowly changing! Just give yourself some time, and tell those doofy kids what's what.
Oh, yes! Ranting my life with your words....
I have had 4 students already email me 'concerned about (my) final grade" and I gave each one the same emailed lecture, brimming with hostility--stop thinking about the grade and think about THE CURRENT ASSIGNMENT. Jebus, one in-class essay, one homework assignment you didn't bother to complete, and you panic? But not enough to read the book or go to tutoring, as I have repeatedly told them to.
Wow...I can't believe how different the systems are. Here in the UK, we don't have quizzes or assignments or homework or extra credit...you have either one big or a couple of small papers (from 2500 to 12000 words), or else one 3-hour exam at the end of the year. It's nowadays mostly submitted anonymously, and at most institutions double marked, with papers scoring high, low, and at grade boundaries being sent to an outside marker. I've never known a student complaining to a lecturer about a mark (although I'm certain it goes on). Oh...and I only have 19 weeks of actual term during the course of the year to worry about preparing lectures...no undergrads the rest of the time. That plus free health care. Everyone, come on over!
I haven't yet had to deal with flunking students complaining - the ones I've had stayed ignorant and uninterested to the bitter end. What I do get are students who get surly and resentful when it becomes apparent that they're going to get a B instead of an A (in a one-credit lab class, no less). I get at least 2 or 3 per semester, and they make me want to stab.
I wish the student who emailed me and then went to my dept. chair to ask me to change her grade asked if there were anything she could do, rather than just saying first there must have been a "misunderstanding," then that she had done some work I hadn't graded, then when I pointed out that she hadn't that she'd misunderstood the assignment, then when I pointed out that the rules were clear on the assignment sheet itself, that she had health problems, then when I pointed out that she hadn't told me in advance that I should change her grade on "compassionate" grounds.
Yeah, right.
I taught 10th and 12th English for twenty years. I went through this kind of whining for years. The sophomores shrugged for the most part, but the seniors, with more at stake, were fools. I wised up and started demanding that they hand in with their term papers every reference source they cited; and with each novel I assigned, I held up the Cliff Notes and said, "On each test, there will be two questions not found in the Cliff Notes. If you miss those two questions, you will fail the test with a 0." I made it clear that the recipe for disaster in my required class was cheating. College professors don't have mommies and daddies coming in whining after the fact. I saved everything. Even then, with the evidence of plagiarism or cheating by not reading a damned book, some parents would still say: "But Johnny doesn't cheat." And, yes, they'd go up the chain of command all the way to the superintendent if they didn't get what they wanted. Guess what? They got what they wanted. The teacher is nothing. Especially when the outraged parents utter the word 'lawsuit'. Fie on political correctness and how it has damaged public schools.
Dear Angry Professor,
Would you be so good as to share with your dedicated reading public what you actually said to the student? My first reaction to these types of emails is "please do fuck off now", but then I never know what to actually do. As I am a lowly graduate student, I take the easy way out available only to those of us at the bottom of the pecking order - I forward the email to the professor for whom I am TAing. One day I hope to be an angry professor, so if you could share your wisdom in these matters I would be appreciative.
Yours,
Angry PhD Candidate
It's very interesting to read all of this. I love your fantasy response to the student. I sometimes wish I could just forward all of my grade grubbers -- from the A- wishing for a solid A to the slacker shocked by a well-deserved D -- all of each other's whining emails. I've got ten extra points right here -- divide it amongst yourselves. Last one standing gets them all. Problem solved. Sigh. Why must the so-called law be so strict?
In a more serious vein, I'm also interested in this post because I have long suspected that it was only humanities professors who were approached by students hoping for a new, better grade. I'm in English, and every time the scenario you describe happens, my colleagues and I grumble: I bet the students don't ask their (math/statistics/chemistry/physics) professors to do this! Our assumption has been that the students will only complain about grades they understand as sheerly interpretive and subjective, and would never try to argue for a change to a grade that has a "factual" basis (they don't, for the most part, believe that there are facts in English, only opinions, of which they have many to which they are rightfully entitled, thanks for asking). I can't figure out if I'm shocked or depressed about this.
Anyway, your blog reminds me that I'm sane, so thanks.
Phoenix--believe it or not, many college profs have occasionally heard from mommies and daddies about bad grades. I heard from one last semester and one this semester. The student whose mama contacted me a few days ago had earned an F in my class after she'd turned in ONE measly assignment all semester long. No research paper, no weekly homework, no rough drafts...ONE little essay after sitting there like a bump on a log for 16 weeks. Mama e-mailed me to ask, "I am shocked at my daughter's F. What happened?" I wish FERPA had not prevented me from saying that her daughter had simply f***ed up in my class. :-) But I simply told her that the only person with whom I could discuss the grade was her daughter due to FERPA regs.
Today's parents are WAY too involved. So much for personal responsibility, eh? These parents, BTW, bitch and whine about other people's "personal responsibility" but conveniently ignore it when it comes to their own damn kids.
anonymous - I told the dunderhead that I would be happy to go through the exam with him/her if s/he would find that useful, and that guidelines for extra credit were in the syllabus.
I was very nice.
Immediately after writing my fantasy response, I got another email almost exactly like the first from a different student, and then one from a student who decided to take a roadtrip on the date of the next quiz and couldn't I please see my way clear to letting him take the quiz early/late/not at all?
IT NEVER ENDS. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
I had a student (again, a graduating senior--why does it always happen then?) who plagiarized over 50 passages of varying length on a take-home final exam OUT OF THE TEXTBOOK FOR THE COURSE. When confronted, she said it was an accident, then said that, since she was a biology major, she wasn't familiar with what constituted plagiarism in a humanities context. I also got an office visit from her parents--both of them lawyers, one of whom brought along a legal dictionary to read me the definition of "plagiarism." They also vaguely hinted at some form of legal action. After she graduated, her parents petitioned the dean for a change in her grade; she already had her degree in hand, so they couldn't revoke it. I was too depressed to find out what actually happened, but I'm sure the dean in question caved (both parents were alums). It's one of the big reasons I no longer teach.
"It's one of the reasons I no longer teach." Heh. I walked out, too, of a wonderful twenty-year career of teaching when I received a 'mild' reprimand (that was not to go into my permanent folder) to assuage the parents of a girl I caught cheating. I didn't press the cheating, but the girl talked-back to me in such a fashion the next day in class that I had to send her out. The public school said, "We must have a conference." In the old days, the kid got tossed into in-school suspension for the day, but the new principal demanded things be resolved in a nice meeting with the parents. Oh barf. The parents showed up and the father was so drunk (at 11 A.M.) that he passed out sitting in his chair. The mother agreed the girl was rude and therefore requested she be switched into the class of the only black teacher in our department because that teacher understood her. Fine. It was a first for me and the administrators and guidance counselor present, but it was a request we had to honor. The mother denied that her daughter cheated even when I showed her the evidence. The father roused himself with a burp and a harummph, and we had to go over everything again because he insisted on having his way. Anyway, the girl also happened to be in Junior ROTC, and that department required notification of any infractions of their rules, and for sure, you know they operated pretty much independently of the politically correct system. They got wind of the cheating, spoke to the student about it, and that was it for me. The parents threatened to bring the NAACP into the mix and called the only black member of the school board, and my professional history of nearly perfect evaluations was blown by the wayside as I was given the reprimand to avoid any legal action threatened by the parents.
I've shortened that debacle somewhat, but I was just one of many who was not supported by the administration in the face of rotten, no-good parents. Eighteen months later, I was gone. But not without the fight of my life. It was an injustice I could not take. The irony of it all was that those involved were just as sickened by the injustice as I was, but they didn't want the lawsuit, and the threat of it was enough to make them weenies of the first order. My career was filled with awards of distinction, and I'd written a book on interdisciplinary education that was lauded over the country, my students consistently scored the highest on the Standards of Learning tests, but none of that mattered.
I ended up shell-shocked and went to a shrink for depression. He told me the American Psychiatric Association had done a study with immense data and the result of the study showed that educators seek mental health therapy more than any other group, and that the number ONE reason why was: Lack of support from administrators. Screw political correctness. And pardon me for adding: Screw the feminist movement because that started all this idiocy of having to worry about offending someone. Such utter crap. Humanity gives up grace for being offended. Fie! Yeah, and screw parents. (Not the good ones, of course.)
Phoenix, what you describe doesn't sound so much like political correctness as an administration that just won't support its teachers, regardless of context.
And I hardly think the feminist movement has anything to do with it.
Another possible response to the "surprised" student:
Dear student,
Yes, I, too, was surprised that you earned and F.
Regards,
Dr. Crit
Miss Kitty, I like the "earned."
I agree with you although you were a bit harsh. Is there NO possibility that it was something else that made the students grade come out so low? Did it happen to be scantron or something so one mismark could result in every answer after being wrong? I think that fact that you jumped to such a conclusion is ignorant. Has something you've done ever been misunderstood? You were probably correct in the fact that they just didn't come but get a life and do something that makes you feel good about yourself instead of puting others down. Stab away.
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