Dear Angry Professor,
Three days before the final something really really bad happened. I thought I could handle it and I took all my finals anyway but I just feel terrible about my performance and I need to know if there's anything else I can do to raise my grade. I'll write a paper or retake the exam, anything. I needed to get an A in this course so that I can get into graduate school. I really wasn't performing at my best and I was trying not to cry in front of the TA but I can't stop crying now. Please, please help me. I'll do anything.Sincerely,
Upset Student
Dear Angry Professor,
I see that my grade on the exam was only a C. If I get my mother to write you a letter verifying this terrible thing that happened to me, could you please please let me retake the exam? Or I'll write a paper, or anything. Let me know. I guess I'm counting on a miracle.Sincerely,
Upset Student
Dear Upset Student,
I'm am very sorry that you are going through a difficult time right now. Unfortunately, I don't know how to help you.Sincerely,
I have your grades in front of me, and I see that you had a D in the class before the final. You actually did very well on the final and you managed to raise your grade from a D to a C. To get even a B-, you would have needed a perfect score on the test. Did you really think it was possible to raise your grade to an A? Indeed, you would have needed a miracle for this to happen.*
Angry Professor
*Edited to add: My actual response was much longer than this. When the soft and sympathetic words were stripped out, this is what it said.
2 comments:
Your students seem to have a really hard time calculating their own grades. This reminded me of your previous post about the student who wanted to know the minimum grade he needed to get on the final in order to pass the class.
When I was a TA, we would post the socres spreadsheet (names replaced with ID numbers, of course) with "percentage grade so far" i.e. the ratio of earned points to possible points so far. This also allowed students to address any discrepancies in case of data-entry mistakes on our part.
It might have been fun to sort the list from highest overall score to lowest, so that the worst performers would experience a sinking sensation proportional to the visual scan down the list of IDs until they found their own, but we weren't so mean-spirited. Back then.
Indeed. The letter that I actually sent wasn't worded as harshly as the one you see here, but I did use the phrase, "Did you really think this would happen?"
With all the new regulations about student privacy, we aren't even permitted to post grades any more, never mind order them from highest to lowest. I've always believed that a little humiliation is a fantastic teaching device, at least at the higher levels of education.
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