<p>Or perhaps participation is an all-or-nothing score.</p>
<p>You said this this was in your syllabus-</p>
<p>“not attending class will not affect your participation grade”</p>
<p>Now…if we remove one word from it, we are left with this-</p>
<p>“not attending class will affect your participation grade”</p>
<p>It’s quite possible that he/she was in a hurry while making this, and accidentally put an extra word in the sentence. As I’ve said, I find it impossible to believe that sending an email with a question is going to count for FULL participation points. It’s more likely that shooting an email or stopping by office hours counts as partial participation points.</p>
<p>How long was this class? 8 weeks? That’s fairly typical for summer classes. Supposing 5 points for participation every day, and you said that you barely ever went to class. If shooting an email counts for one participation point, or even 2, that is going to make a pretty big dent in your grade, especially if participation is 10% of the grade. Supposing 8 weeks, twice a week, at 5 points a day, that’s 80 points. If participation was 10%, that means 800 points total. Supposing you got two points for participation a day, that adds up to 32 of the possible 80. Even assuming that you did not miss a single point on any exams or anything, that has automatically dropped your grade to a 94% Assuming that you didn’t, in fact, get perfect scores on all of your exams…it should be quite clear that this isn’t that unreasonable. And that was assuming 2 participation points for shooting an email. If it was 1 point, your grade has automatically dropped to a 92%</p>
<p>Imagine that you had gone to every class, but never participated while there (but had done the same amount of out-of-class participation). Imagine also that you would have gotten the same participation grade as you actually received. Doesn’t that mean that the prof would have been right that class attendance would not affect your participation grade?</p>
<p>I think the mistake you are making is to assume that your low participation grade is because you skipped class, when it could be because you just didn’t participate very much.</p>
<p>I agree with many of the other posters. I think his syllabus probably meant that missing a class wouldn’t lower your participation grade, but by not attending, you’re not earning any points either. Sending emails asking questions probably earned you some points (if this was 10% of your grade, you had to have gotten SOME points to go from a B+ to a B-, otherwise it would be a B+ to a C+), but the quality of your participation was likely not as good as the quality of other students participation or didn’t amount to much at all. Asking questions isn’t the same as contributing to the conversation, answering questions the TA or other students ask, etc. He may have not considered it to be worth the full grade. He didn’t mark you down for not attending, but he couldn’t very well give you points for not attending as well.</p>
<p>When I was a TA, some professors encouraged us to grade participation on somewhat of a curve (consider the student who participated the most and give them 100% and then go down in gradations from there). It is subjective, but participation grades often are. Sometimes they give a certain amount of points for talking, but this is usually talking during class. You might get a point for sending an email, but when I gave credit for asking questions over email or coming to office hours, it was never as much as participating in class.</p>
<p>You are welcome to go to the professor (or grad student, whatever) and argue about it, but I personally wouldn’t give you any points. You are welcome to go above his head to the department or whatever, but my personal opinion is that you got the grade you earned.</p>
<p>I didn’t even see that in the OP. You would have gotten a B+, aside from participation points. I think the calculations I did a couple posts back basically explain this then. Supposing you got an average of 2 participation points per day through the semester, your grade would have dropped 6 percentage points. That’s the difference between a B+ and a B-.</p>
<p>Say that the class was 15 weeks, and it met 3 times a week for 50 minutes each class session. That would be 2250 minutes in class. Say that talking 2% of the time (45 minutes total) would be considered full participation. The more classes you skip, the more time you must talk in each class you attend. At some point, you are skipping so many classes that you cannot reach the 45 minute goal.</p>
<p>If the teacher is to be faulted, it is for using the quoted language without considering that there might be a student who would skip so many classes that it would not be possible for him to reach the 45 minute goal. But for most students, it would indeed be true that “not attending class will not affect your participation grade,” provided there is adequate participation on the days of attendance.</p>