How to deal with bizarre situation with teacher, affecting daughter's grades?

Both verification of the grading and reviewing of the material are more difficult if the exam questions and answers are confidential. If the student does not know what kind of questions she got correct and incorrect, she will not be able to review the material as effectively or know what she should focus on when asking the teacher for help with the material.

Im confused as to what you are exactly looking for since she knows her percentage (which is easy to figure out how many she got wrong.)

Our school mutes the score initially as it allows instructor to review test question analytics.

Are you certain there is a way to give her a report without listing the actual test questions?

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Is it possible the test was very difficult and was curved? Perhaps the score actually equates to better than a C?

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So you believe they didn’t check because they didn’t provide you with a printout, which makes you believe they’re lying. You have no proof that they didn’t check.

Perhaps it didn’t occur to the school that while they were doing what they say they did, you were assuming the worst case scenario: discrimination and a cover up.

I am unclear if she discussed with the teacher what she could improve on in the test or if there are any concepts she misunderstood.

It seems to me the main issue is that it’s hard to believe the student got a C and the district isn’t doing enough to prove she really got that grade. Except the test result.

I am not so sure of placing so much implicit confidence in the school. They are large bureaucracies within which individual teachers can behave in ways inconsistent with school policy. Schools are also generally not great at policing themselves.

I personally saw multiple times how schools behaved inconsistently over the years. My son was placed in lower math and I later found that other people with much lower scores were placed in advanced math. Instead of arguing, he took the upper math courses at an online school so he could enter high school at a higher level.

Similarly, a teacher gave a failing score to my son and insisted that my son never submitted a paper final. The gradebooks were almost closed when I son waded through all of the paper records in the teacher’s office and ultimately found that final in which he by the way got a 100%. This was in his sophomore year and would have doomed him at every school he applied to and got in eventually.

Teachers and schools make mistakes all the time, and when they refuse to be transparent its natural to ascribe ulterior motives and wonder what they are hiding.

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We’re taking about a multiple choice test taken and graded on Canvas, no?
That’s not open to subjective grading. Either the student got the answer correct or not.

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In theory there should be no subjective grading because it’s all multiple choice

BUT the human component enters because they refused to show us the Canvas auto-graded score report. Instead, the teacher just verbally told the class and my daughter individually what they got, in terms of number correct (no deductions of points for wrong answers). The Canvas landing page for the score was muted & has stayed muted this whole time.

The focus has been on the SCORE. I’m suggesting that the student might get more cooperation if she’s move off the SCORE and moves on to the content
 No teacher intentionally wants kids to misunderstand the material. But many teachers get defensive when their grading policy, competence, honesty gets challenged.

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Yes, and I mentioned above that both my kids asked about grades at various points and received changes to a grade. I understand schools are bureaucratic and that teachers and admin can make mistakes. It’s the circumstance the OP presents in this post that I am referring to.

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I agree about the “human component” here. Just a few months ago, my daughter received a very low grade on a multiple choice test she was very prepared for and felt she did well. The kids in the class began discussing it with each other and discovered that no student received higher than a C. They mentioned this to the teacher who hadn’t realized due to the computerized scoring, but upon verifying (which she was happy to do), she realized that she input several incorrect answers into the system. So, answers that were actually correct were marked incorrect. She made the appropriate changes which increased the grade of every student in the class. Mistakes are made all the time, but a teacher who is unwilling to review a test with a student, makes no sense to me. Teachers in our school district are required to allow a student to see the test and their answers, though it often needs to be done in the teacher’s classroom.

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I think you should be able to have in person meeting to review the answers. The whole purpose of test is to measure what you learned. You shouldn’t be taking a test just to score a particular grade. Like why should you walk away thinking something was learned if it wasn’t. Does that make sense?

Was this graded manually or though some type of scanner? My kids have had experiences where the teacher used the wrong answer key to grade a multiple choice test. Another reason kids should have the opportunity to review their results.

I don’t see a reason why a teacher would deliberately score low. It’s not to their benefit. In our district grades are a reflection of the teacher too.

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Thank you for sharing your story, I think people need to realize strange things happen all the time, some of which may result from and be explainable with human error

In general though, I think it’s honestly gotten to the point where it’s not “how we feel” but the facts

Sure, is it cringeworthy as a parent if we get to the bottom of things and we were indeed overreacting a little, yes, but if that’s the price to pay in order to settle for once and all whether the suspicions are true then what’s there to be embarrassed about

If I backed down now and told my daughter we’re not going to do anything even though she really thinks something is wrong, what am I teaching her?? That even though she thinks she wasn’t treated right, with the likelihood that the issue would persist into the future if the teacher does the same thing to the same students in that demographic next term, she just needs to take it?

For one thing, I would rather my daughter be overly bold in this world than be overly timid, she’d probably have fewer regrets that way

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This thread is not about a mistake by a teacher. This thread is about a multi-person conspiracy within the school being carried out against a certain demographic subset of students. There have been no examples given of this happening previously in the school year. So, at the end of the year, after exhibiting no previous bias against these students, multiple people in this school have decided to risk their careers and band together to carry out this conspiracy to give students of a certain demographic a C on an exam.

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I don’t follow education news that closely, but even I know there was a scandal not so long ago with multiple school districts’ teachers changing the kids’ exams, oftentimes for years on end, with the admin’s implicit permission, but in that case it was so they could get higher bonuses for showing greatest “improvements”

It’s a touchy topic to begin with, I know, with all the triggering issues especially with regards to teachers’ human fallibility and demographics etc

From some of the responses, it seems it’s perhaps even more emotionally triggering to some to even entertain the idea that there may be some teachers who are not perfect all the time, because it would imply the real possibility that their own kids may face a similar situation one day under a similar type of teacher
eg. No new bride really wants to entertain the idea that the love of her life may not be who she thinks he is, because the jerks only happen to get married to other people, of course

then they should have no issues assuring the parent and student by simply sharing which and how many questions she got wrong.

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The issue is that you’ve already lost the “battle” with the school, because it’s clear your D’s intention is not to find out how she can improve and what she got wrong, but to get to the bottom of an alleged conspiracy theory.

Unless you turn the page and give your D some actual, helpful ways to move forward, what are you teaching her exactly? That the cards are stacked against her and it’s her job to unravel the evidence whenever she suspects a conspiracy?

I get why the teacher doesn’t want to play ball here. Move the dialogue along to a more helpful place, i.e. “I prepared well. I thought I knew the material but it turns out I didn’t. Can you help me?”

I don’t find your posts “emotionally triggering”. I find them funny in a sad way. Maybe the teacher made a mistake. Does calling out a racial conspiracy help the teacher fix the mistake in a way that doesn’t end her career? I’m voting no. There are many ways to move on. You’ve chosen the dead end. Your D still has a C, has no clue what she got wrong or where her command of the material is weak, and you have no proof of your conspiracy.

Score- zero.

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Has your D (or the group of students) asked to go over the exam with the teacher in the classroom so they can understand their mistakes (and perhaps offer to leave their cellphones elsewhere so they can’t possibly take pictures of the exam)?

Agree that your D’s tact with the teacher should be on wanting to be sure she understands the material rather than proving some conspiracy theory.

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Certainly, teachers can make a mistake. However, I have never heard of a conspiracy within a school to lower the grades of a certain demographic of students.

The point of my posts has been this
you are giving serious consideration to a proposition that is highly unlikely to be true. Overwhelmingly unlikely. I know it can be triggering for some parents to realize their superstar got a C on an exam but it just happened to you. It’s fine. Most of us here have been through this and we all survived.

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Yep, it happens all the time. No one wants to correct a mistake that can show things happened and expose them to review. Not a conspiracy at all.

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