It’s that season again–but boy is it worse than it used to be, and it’s just beginning for this semester.
Reasons suggested so far why I should change grades:
I paid for this class.
I need a higher grade to get honors.
I need a higher grade to get into X major.
I don’t want to fail.
I worked hard.
My papers are great.
Some of these are more egregious than others, but none are going to be a reason I change a grade. I am dismayed that students are more and more thinking that this is a reasonable expectation.
@garland I wish students (and sometimes their parents) and society as a whole valued failure as a necessary step to success. By giving students the grade they deserve, you are giving them a gift – the gift of learning from disappointment. Stay strong!
@garland Every May, there was someone who had registered, then barely showed up, turned in no work, but pleaded to DH, “I need this class to graduate.” 'Scuuuse me?
@garland DS1 was disappointed with his performance in a class one semester. He simply apologized to the professor for not doing well. He had been at all classes and help sessions. He told him it was his own fault for not having the time management skills to do better. His grades were an upward trend and he did well in the final but I really think the professor gifted him the grade he got. DS1 surely didn’t expect it. It was a CS class and if the program broke you got a zero. No partial credit.
I have definitely heard stories from my public high school parent-friends about similar attitudes toward grades among their children’s college classmates. However, to be fair, the students in question had come from private schools where student begging and parental complaints could, in fact, result in a grade change. I know this wouldn’t happen at all private schools, but around here tuition-paying parents seem to have some clout–one reason I suspect some prep schools are easier than top publics.
I got a phone call the other night from one of my students the night before a big exam. My number is unlisted, but she had it from elementary school when she was in my daughter’s class. I saw her name come up on the display, and yelled “I"M NOT HOME!!!” before anyone could answer.
So her mommy texted me, asking me to call when I got a chance.
Yes, she is a senior in high school. She’s headed your way.
Teachers do not randomly assign grades!!! We report on the scores you’ve earned. if your 0.1 or 0.2 points short, you should have worked a bit harder to ensure you hit the threshold you were aiming for-- it certainly was attainable.
Today’s report cards included any number of 79’s and 89’s. That next level would have been so easy to achieve. But it’s on the person earning the grade, not the one reporting it.
Repeat after me: “This is MY education. I need to take responsibility for it.”
Shouldn’t it usually be " My parents have spent a lot of money on this class?"
My friend’s son always went to beg for a higher grade in HS. He and my S17, who never gave a crud about his grades, are at the same college - one where auditions and interviews are more important than grades. His mom thought it was embarrassing and demeaning and I kind of wished my own kids cared enough about their grades to work harder for a higher one.
One of my professors WHO WAS VERY LENIENT said early on in the semester “If you don’t do homework and don’t come to class and want to come beg for a grade in December, I’ll laugh at you.”
My kid who is a TA got her class reviews back yesterday, and there was a lot of complaining about grading. Which she was doing exactly as the profs directed. She told me it was the off semester for students in the major sequence, so many of the students had failed the class once and were retaking.
She, too, had many students who didn’t complete homework and didn’t ever come to the tutoring lab staffed by the TAs, then complained when their quiz & test grades were bad. As a woman, she was also told multiple times by students that she didn’t understand the class subject (which she does). All in all, she found her first semester of TAing to be a bad experience. Fortunately she does not aspire to a career in academia. She has a couple more teaching semesters to go.
One of my colleagues said that he had decided to scale up the total number of points available during the semester to 1,000,000. Then when a student who was upset came to his office to ask for a grade bump, he could say, “I am sorry, I could not possibly give you 10,000 extra points.”
This is learned behavior. Somewhere in the K12 morass, students tried this technique, and it worked. I think affluent suburban public school districts are primarily responsible for this, but I don’t see it changing anytime soon. Competitive private schools usually don’t allow it because they have 2 students desperate to enroll for every kid already there, and inner-city underprivileged kids often don’t have a guardian who would suggest this or advocate for them. Most of the college students Garland is likely to meet are from affluent suburban public schools, aren’t they?
“We report on the scores you’ve earned. if your 0.1 or 0.2 points short, you should have worked a bit harder to ensure you hit the threshold you were aiming for-- it certainly was attainable.”
“Right. It would have been incredibly easy to earn those last 0.2 points.”
“Today’s report cards included any number of 79’s and 89’s. That next level would have been so easy to achieve.”
It’s also incredibly easy to make statements like this^^ when, most likely, you don’t have a kid with a learning disability. I do, and it’s very difficult to see him working as hard as his siblings to do well, knowing that his grades will not be as reflective of his efforts as theirs are.
That said, I would be really annoyed with any my kids if they ever tried to use those excuses listed by the OP with any of their teachers/professors.