And to speak to grade grubbing, son had a classmate 1 grade ahead of him who was NMF with multiple AP classes with all 5s and over a 4.5 WGPA, but the kid was rejected to every Top 10 he applied to including Stanford where he was legacy.
The kid was known as a grade grubber and even made the school newspaper in an article on the subject. He ended up at UCSB which was actually better for his specific major. I remember that the kid wrote an apology a few years later in the paper regretting his actions and wishing he was more humble (he was one of the editors in the school paper back in the day) in his dealings with teachers.
I’m sure the kid might have had a better outcome if he had been more humble when it counted, since there were other students with lower GPAs who ended up going to Top 20 schools.
@damon30 I didn’t ask her to bump my grade, but what happened was the first homework assignment of the quarter, I turned it in on google classroom 2 minutes late, and so she gave me a 2.5/5 points on that. I asked her politely if she could give me back the points then because I was just 2 minutes late, and she said next year they won’t do that and that it won’t end up affecting my grade because it’s just a small homework assignment…
Well, I did the math and the extra 2.5 points WOULD have made a significant difference, and I tried explaining this to her yesterday. She hasn’t responded to my email. Not sure if she’s ignoring it, but she often takes a while to respond. I can’t talk to her in class until Thursday as its finals week.
I would be ignoring it if I were the teacher. It now sounds like the grade grubbing has been going on for a while now, OP, and you are just a freshman.
That is called a lesson for the future and is good experience for college and beyond. Instructors (and in later life, your bosses) will expect instructions to be followed. In college, if the instructor says that assignments are submitted via the drop box at midnight, don’t be surprised when he refuses the hard copy you hand him the day before or gives a zero for transmitting at 00:02. If the answer for an exam requires 2 significant figures and your answer has 3, expect a deduction. If the instructions say to write your final answer on the cover sheet (or box the final answer, etc.), and you don’t, the grader will not go searching through your scratch paper to guess what you thought the final answer is. If the Russian exam says write in Cyrillic script, it means don’t print. Instructors will deduct points, and the opportunities for regrades/retakes/extra credit don’t exist.
To be honest, your teachers don’t care about your “significant difference” or your “clear reason.” And polite is expected, not an incentive for a teacher to give you points you haven’t earned.
I think you seem to misunderstand what grades are.
They’re a written record of the points you’ve earned. They’re not given, they’re merely recorded. So grade grubbing is asking your teachers (yes, apparently plural) to lie-- to say that you’ve earned points that you haven’t.
And every single grade grubber in the history of mankind has felt that he/she was a special case, with a special reason for a special request-- that his/her teachers lie about the actual score and add points.
Your teacher has read your email. She has chosen not to reply. Don’t talk to her in class. Don’t send a followup email. Don’t have your mom or dad or aunt or uncle or best friend ask.
Accept the grade you’ve earned. Follow the directions, adhere to the deadlines, get the answers right.
@squ1rrel
Thank you for responding. The others have freely expressed their opinions and I freely express mine - you are handling this exactly the right way. Let me list the reasons.
freshman year grades count. Every small point can make a difference.
there are many ways to get the points, but they all count the same. Students should learn all ways to get those points however they can, short of academic dishonesty.
from a school and instructor's perspective, good students are good and bad students are bad, it's as simple as that. The ways in which good students can be annoying (i.e. "grade grubbing") are trivial compared to the real problems of bad students. An instructor whose main problem is top students who "grade grub" should consider themselves extremely fortunate.
if there ever is a good time to "grade grub", it would be freshman year. Per post #23, you don't learn anything if you don't try and make mistakes. As long as you are polite, no real harm is done. You will have many chances to get LoRs, etc., and they are very unlikely to come from instructors who teach freshmen classes anyway. Good luck!
If s/he gives you 5 extra points on the final or a half point on your quarter grade they have to do that for everyone. If there are other sections taught by different teachers, this isn’t fair to their students. If they do it for your class, it’s not fair to last years’ class either. Some of those students could probably have used a boost to even out other grades too.
Your issue seems to be that a B+ is dragging down your GPA. But you earned the B+ in that class and the A- in this one. Why should your teacher give your entire class points you didn’t earn? It seems like at some point that becomes academic dishonesty on the part of the school.
@austinmshauri It’s the difference between an A and A+ for me (current grade is 97.1, with extra 2.5 homework points this would round up to a 98, as it brings up my quarter grade)…
I think some of the people here are missing the point…@skieurope I think I will take away the most from what you mentioned about strictness with teachers… what I messed up here was that I didn’t think I could get an A+ in this class and so I didn’t try that hard, which is why I didn’t really care and this resulted in a (barely) late submission. When I realized I could get an A+, it was too late.
I may seem like a grade grubber to you guys but really all this comes down to is whether or not my teacher will reward me 2.5 homework points for submitting something 2 minutes late. I would NEVER plainly ask my teacher to bump up my grade; in my case, I did my homework and deserved the credit for it, but it was my fault for submitting it past the deadline on Google Classroom. I’ve learned my lesson.
I’m not sure where you all thought that I grade grubbed in another class…in another thread, I mention putting a decimal point lightly in an answer but my math teacher not being able to read it. Everyone else in the class said they could see it, but my math teacher didn’t end up giving me the points. What else could I have done? If you lost points on a test because your math teacher claims that your decimal point isn’t dark enough, wouldn’t you at least TRY to get the points you RIGHTEOUSLY deserve? The decimal point was in my work, it just “wasn’t clear” on my final answer key and my instructor acknowledged that.
And for the record, he did end up giving my points back for that, just much later; I just never mentioned it here. I truly believe it was right on my part. Grade grubbing is different from fighting for the points your deserve. Unless there is a discrepancy between my definition of grade grubbing and yours.
I don’t know what the issue is. You lost the 2.5 points because you didn’t follow the rules. You know now not to do it again but for this time you will have to live with the consequences.
Don’t get locked up in the minutiae. It’s not just the wrong focus, it’s not the sort of personality top adcoms look for. They want kids who stretch, easily and comfortably. Not the attitude that, " didn’t think I could get an A+ in this class and so I didn’t try that hard," followed by a last minute crunch.
An A grade is an A grade, whether a minus or plus is attached.
An A+++ in this class won’t erase the B you got in stem class, when you want a stem major. It’s not the end of the world, because you were a freshman. You can increase math rigor, going forward, and get A grades, get top AP scores, solid SAT/ACT, find the right rounded ECs that are meaningful to adcoms, etc.
Nor do top colleges admit based on who’s got the higher gpa. You need to learn what does matter. When you apply to colleges, it’s not the same as getting to tops in your one hs.
You won’t get there if your energies and attitude are misplaced. Now’s the time to have a little talk with yourself.
Oh my god my teacher raised my grade and I didn’t know it…and I thought she wouldn’t so I didn’t go full send on the finals and now I still won’t get an A+.
Honestly you are placing way too much importance on the difference between an A and an A+. There are way more important things in life and there will be way more important parts of your application.
@squ1rrel
So what lessons have you learned? Are you up for it? It’s a hostile crowd. In the honesty department, I think you’ve been doing great so far.
Well everyone here has conveyed that you shouldn’t be a grade grubber.
But, I’ve learned that the line between arguing for something you arguably deserve and grade grubber is rather blurred. It can depend on the teacher. Here, I personally knew that my teacher was very nice and probably would end up doing so. There are other teachers that I wouldn’t have even tried.
As @lookingforward stated above, I shouldn’t base my effort based on what I think I can get as a grade. You never know if the extra effort is going to help you in the long run.
Also, I shouldn’t waste my time and fret on small things like this often.
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