Two things happened on Friday. First, I gave a final exam in statistics. Second, and more importantly, I spent over two hours in my dentist's office being stabbed, drilled, ground, molded, re-glued and otherwise worked over. My graduate students proctored the exam while I was being tortured by people who must have trained under Pol Pot.
I returned to my office after my adventure, numb to my cranium, the entire left side of my face drooping and a steady stream of saliva pouring down my left boob. I was starving. I tried to eat, against my dentist's explicit prohibitions, and succeeded in ingesting a significant portion of my left lower lip.
Then I checked my email. I found a series of desperate messages from a statistics student who had missed the exam for no good reason except that he had been very, very late. Each message detailed the tears he was shedding, how sorry he was, how if he fails the class he will both lose his financial aid and not get into med school.
My course policy is very clear: if you don't call ahead of time, no makeup exam. I'm very generous about makeups, but I expect the courtesy of a phone call. (I violated this policy once for a student who had been called up for active duty and had to report to his base the morning of the exam. First responders and students defending their country get a free pass.) I blew a sloppy raspberry at my workstation, shut everything down and went home and ate Vicodin.
I haven't checked my mail since.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
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19 comments:
Wow, if I didn't know that you aren't in NYC, I would wonder if we had the same student.
I had the same thing last term, "slept through the alarm." Sorry. If he had emailed me right away or called the department I would have waited for him and given the exam. Sorry kid. Do what I did when I had a test in the morning and I was up late studying--set TWO alarms and get a roommate or friend to make sure you're up./..
After finishing undergrad I took some courses at a local university to fill in some gaps before going to grad school. I was unaccustomed to the quarter system and to being an employee who was taking a class, as opposed to a student who was also working.
The final for one of my classes was at a different day and time than the regularly scheduled class, and I wrote it down on the calendar wrong. The morning I was supposed to be in the final, I checked the schedule for the finals just to be sure, and found out that the final had already started. By the time I got to class, the final had just finished and the professor was walking back to his office. I ran after him and caught up with him right before his office. I explained that I had the wrong day for the final, and asked him if I could take it right there, fully expecting him to say no and give me a zero. He did let me take it right there, out in the hallway, and I was so glad he did. It would really suck to lose hundreds of dollars on account of writing down the wrong date, but people lose much more money over worse things.
Vicodin is wonderful. I spent most of this week (spring break, darnit!) looking like a chipmunk.
If you're stuck with soft foods, just see it as an opportunity to eat all the ice cream and rice pudding you want. ;-)
Welcome to adulthood. It happens.
I once -- once -- had a student who had a medical emergency, landed in the emergency room, and called about 30 minutes after the final had ended, as soon as the doctors had finished with him.
Like sara, he asked to take the exam right then. He had taken a lot of meds. He was completely disoriented. He kept forgetting the name of the course, the name of the teacher, who I was and why he was talking to me on the phone, etc. This was to be expected given the nature of the medical emergency. I was pretty impressed that the department secretary had figured out that I was the one he needed to talk to.
The exam was all essay questions requiring critical evaluation of the arguments of different philosophers.
I refused to give him the exam that day. I told him he was getting an Incomplete and that he would be taking a makeup as soon as he and I were both on campus at the same time. (He was an international student from a different continent, and his parents showed up that day to take him home. It's not as if he could have simply recuperated for a couple of days and had his mom drive him back.)
He did not grasp that I was doing him a favor.
I am sure that a significant number of my students would have been stunned to learn that someone as mean as I was ever did something like that. After all, how is a medical emergency on the day of the final any better an "escuse" having bought a fish tank and spent the weekend watching the fish instead of studying for the midterm?
Someone pointed me to your blog and I'm loving it. As a Faculty Wife, I am enjoying reading sentiments similar to those I hear each evening over a glass of wine.
I have one of those. Only its an inline course, so she had ALL WEEK to take the exam. Oh, and the story about she's a single mom who couldn't get a babysitter and forgot to see when the center was open and...
Remember, these folks know they have an exam, ALL WEEK, since the start of teh semester, and I give explicit instructions for everyone to make arrangements for taking the exam, as well as double-checking when the center is open by calling the center directly, in my syllabus, my orientation presentation, and the announcements about the midterm information.
*raspberry at screen*
Ah, the joy of pre-meds. I married one (which was a big mistake, but he really is a good doctor). They're a breed apart in many ways. Just tell him that, in med school, you don't get make-ups, and it's not unheard of for them to make a laboring mother take the test with everyone else, even with the baby on the way (the prof said there were people there who knew how to deliver, so it was no big deal).
Did someone ever cut you a break you didn't deserve? It happened to me. The midterms had been in the evening, but the final was 8 am in the morning. I had assumed it was 8 pm. I got an email from the TA around 11:30am as I was studying. I rushed off to campus (25 minutes away) and was allowed to take the exam right then. I still can't believe that I dodged that bullet. The class was a critical pre-req for my application to graduate school. It would have literally been the worse screw-up of my life.
This was several years ago and beyond gushing thank-you's, I never did anything to show my appreciation in a way commensurate with how much it meant to me.
I just had to send a note something like the following to a student who hasn't attended in two weeks:
"In order to successfully complete the literature review project, you must participate in classroom group activities, keep track of your contributions to the literature collection, contribute to group progress memos, write sections of the manuscript, and work with the team to present a single coherent [and documented] project.
These aren't the sort of activities that you can "make up" over Spring Break. You didn't keep your group up to date about your work, or contribute to their progress. You didn't notify me about your absences or reasons for them. So as it stands, you are flunking this section of the course, and your group has decided to go on without you.
You need to talk to your advisor about the choices you have made and the consequences of those decisions, which may postpone your graduation for a year, if this course is a required course for your degree."
We'll see what elaborate form of groveling this evokes. Fortunately, I've already emailed the program chair about it.
Oh my! Hope you're feeling better soon.
And that twit of a student can blow it out his ear. :-)
Well, once when I was a sophomore in college, I studied late into the wee hours for my final in organic chemistry, then overslept through my alarm into the exam time; waking, throwing on sweats & running across campus, arriving just before the end of the period. I was not allowed to take the exam right then, because other students had already left. I was told to see the academic advising office to determine if I could take a make up. They let me because I had good grades and no history of screwing up.
Point is, even conscientious students can make a mistake, it shouldn't ruin them.
You did the right thing with the student, and I bet I have more crowns than you do. I have 15 of the dam things. Each on put on separately from the other so I had all those wonderful session of needles and grinding and forming. I feel your pain.
I took a number of classes at a nearby University while I was in high school. This caused some amusing scheduling mash-ups, and some very accomodating professors. My favorites:
I had a multi-day English class field-trip the clashed with a midterm. Rather than make me agonize over which I wanted to do, the professor delivered the exam to my house and let me take it over the weekend, proctored by my dad. What made this so notable was that it was an hour round-trip for the professor to deliver the exam, and he was spending every waking non-teaching hour in the hospital with his wife and *very* premature newborn son.
My last term before going to college full-time, one of my finals conflicted with my High School practice graduation. So I could either take the final, or celebrate my high school graduation. The professor let me reschedule for the next Monday...so I graduated High School with a final left to do.
Then there were the finals one term of grad. school that were worked around a friend's wedding in Italy, but, well, that's grad. school and people tend to be a lot more accomodating then...and the finals tend to be take-home, so there wasn't much that a fax machine couldn't compensate for:)
Now, I did sleep into the first thirty minutes of an exam once-- it was horrifying, I let out a shriek that would have done a banshee proud, and flat out RAN across the quad still wearing my sweats and flip flops.
I skidded toward the lecture hall, breathless, to be met by the prof before I reached the door. He had small brown spots on his shirt. Before I could offer my profoundest apologies, the professor told me after I had arrived that he had watched me run halfway, take off my flipflops, and then run barefoot the rest of the way as he looked out his tiny window. He showed me where he had spit his coffee against the windowpane from laughing after I hurtled a St. Bernard that was being walked across the campus by some neighborhood denizen.
I got to take the exam. Got a B. Was grateful.
Second semester freshman year, I was on the verge of getting kicked out of school. A professor called me into his office and told me that I was going to get a D in his class, enough to end my relationship with that university. We talked for a long time, not a lecture between an lazy student and a disappointed teacher, but like two grown men and after I admitted to over-indulging in the college experience in that first year away from home, and he bumped me up one point to a C- and I was able to stay.
That professor died six months later, and I never think about the best years of my life without thinking of him.
I've nearly been late to a couple of tests but never a final or midterm. Once was I nearly overslept but ended up sprinting across the quad to the lecture hall to take it, I was taking benadryl at the the time for a case of hives I got from a dry cleaned shirt. The other time was me acting as a tour guide for our admissions office and what was suppose to be a 30 minute quick tour of some of the campus turned into an hour and a half with the mother asking every single question even though half were not going to pertain to her son, who was not even there. He already took the tour with his dad but the mother wanted to take it so she could see it herself. She resisted every attempt I made to get them moving. Happened to be both tests I was nearly late for were for physics I and II (one test in each).
What about being called into the Haitian military? One of my math classmates had to leave due to some unpleasantness in his home country...
(Of course, the student in question probably had to make up the entire semester.)
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