My S had a moment of clarity on this. He was .25% away from the A cut off and got an A-. He didn’t complain but was annoyed. Then he just made the B cutoff in another class by .40%. It all works out in the end!
The cutoffs are less important with +/- grading. It’s more damaging and painful to get a B instead of A- for the .25%, if you worked really hard.
Another thing is that, with the recent grade “inflation,” getting more A’s is getting more important. And probably is a wise choice to distribute study time to get all subjects slightly above 90% than getting couple of B’s while acing the others, especially with full letter grade system without +/-.
Sometimes it means doing the 2% extra credit project which is a waste of huge time, instead of studying more to increase your 20% counting final exam score from 80% to 90%, which is more academically valuable but riskier to achieve.
Of course, such playing with the fire can occasionally burn you with a 89.75% B which a sympathetic professor may or may not round.
Some students do work as hard as they can. And working harder for a subject means less time and energy for another. Even a science lab could be purposely missed to cram more dates for history mid term expecting it to be dropped as the lowest, but then you may become really sick for another lab later…
It’s a cheap trick but I make students write me a formal letter explaining why they think their grade should be changed, which must make reference to the syllabus and rubric. 95% of whiners don’t bother once I tell them that. Once or twice the letters have convinced me.
For what it’s worth, I’m moderator of NHS in my school.
The requirements for admission include a particular grade point average-- no rounding. Every year I have to tell a number of kids who email me that the reason they weren’t inducted was because they missed the GPA by one or two tenths of a point.
It’s a pity. But the line has to be somewhere, and they’ve fallen on the wrong side of it.
My daughter came to me last week upset that she had a B in a class that she previously had an A listed. She got 25/25 on the final and then her final grade was posted as a B.
She politely emailed the professor, asking if there was an explanation. She in no way asked for a grade bump. The professor emailed her back saying she had a 0 averaged in at the end from earlier in the semester. My daughter was a transfer and missed a deadline the first week of the semester because she didn’t understand their computer system so she got a 0.
She emailed her professor back and thanked her for the explanation.
A few days ago she came and said her final grade had been changed to an A. Simply communicating with her professor in a polite manner without asking for anything in return must have prompted the professor to relook at it. I guess we will never know if it was just that her grade was that close, or if the professor recognized that her one problem was the first week of school. My daughter also said that the class had 120 students but only about 30 showed up regularly. She was one of the 30. She doesn’t know if the professor could match her name to her face but maybe she did and that made a difference.
I think that asking for clarification is light years from asking for a bump.
I got an email from a student on Saturday morning-- grades were posted Friday night. He wasn’t asking for a bump, merely for his grade on the end of marking period exam.
I broke down his grades for him-- his exam grade, test average, quiz average,and homework grade… I think he had forgotten that he owed me 2 homework assignments he had never made up. He politely thanked me and wished me a Merry Christmas. (oh, and by the way, he ended the marking period with a 98 in Precalc.)
No problem at all there. It wasn’t a request for extra credit or extra points, merely for an explanation. I’m fine with transparency because in my class you get what you get. If I’ve made an error I’ll be happy to correct it. But I’m not giving you points that your classmates had to earn.
When i was in college, there were no attendance requirements and generally only a midterm and final and, in some classes, a paper or two. If I had had hw every day, there is no way I could have routinely taken between 17 and 21 credits and still worked 30 hours a week. I feel badly for the kids who have all this hw now. I think there should be two types of classes to choose from - one where hw counts and one that assesses only on tests and/or papers.
I attended a brand new law school. There were no attendance requirements the first semester. I had a really awful sexist professor who was a rabbi and would say things to me like “I can’t believe you aren’t married yet” and “Did you know that we had to turn away a man to accept you in the school?” Meanwhile, I was on full scholarship. Needless to say, I hated this man and his class and rarely went. Came time for the final and I got the highest grade on the test, which was the only criterion for passing. The next semester, attendance rules were put into place. I set up my schedule so that I never had another class with that teacher.
Only my language and lab classes have attendance policies, which are for obvious reasons. Physics class took attendance and had quizzes, but they were announced via email, so one would only need to show up about 9 times (out of 30) over the semester to take quizzes and exams. Attendance was never taken in my combined undergrad/grad courses last semester; one of them had all homework and exam dates announced only in class, so it would be difficult to pass when skipping unless a friend attended - homework and exam dates were available online for the other, so it would be perfectly possible to do well without attending (except for exams)
I don’t see the point of requiring attendance for classes where the material can be learned just as well from a book or online by motivated students (e.g. low-level physics, history, English, any math, etc.) Of course, requiring attendance in studio art, PE, language, team ethics, public speaking, and classes where lectures go beyond accessible resources (many don’t), etc. is reasonable because what a student would miss by skipping cannot be made up by reading a textbook or something online.
Personally, I feel like I’m insulting my professors when I skip classes. I missed classes this semester for about a week due to sickness and felt really ashamed of it, even though it didn’t affect my grade (due to 2 free French absences and 1 free lab absence). I missed a lot of physics classes for various reasons, but my professor didn’t feel that A students needed to attend class and offered for me to make up quizzes beforehand.
I’ve never taught a writing composition class that didn’t have an attendance requirement as part of the program. Lots of what we do is in-class and participatory–it is a process class–think of it like a lab if that makes it make sense to you–and I think having an attendance requirement is important.
@garland I’ve never had a good English teacher - if they didn’t lecture straight from the text I would have wanted to attend.
I’m sorry about that! But this is not really English–it’s writing. Definitely not a “lecture” class.
In my case, at least, it’s not really about that. Just this semester we had 29 homework assignments, 12 labs, 2 exams, 3 in-class worksheets, 2 points/day for attendance, 1 point/day extra credit for attending recitations, and a final exam. 1100 points, weighted grades, and many hours on my part spent making it all up and grading it all.
Now you want an extra credit assignment worth enough points to actually move your grade. I can’t just give it to one person, because other people might want the opportunity to raise their grades as well. So I have to make up something amounting to more than a homework assignment, post it, give people time to submit it, and grade it, all before finishing out the semester, which goes into high gear after Thanksgiving. And you have to spend time working on it which you should be spending preparing for the final, yada, yada.
@garland Once I switch from dual credit to being a freshman/junior math/stats major next fall, I’d like to take a writing class that goes through the process more. My “writing” classes have mostly been “This is what a good [insert type of document] has. This is what a bad one has.” Not much use in attending those, if it wasn’t for attendance policies. My French classes are much more about the process.
Hmm, to me an English course is (usually) a writing/analysis course, but since I’ve only taken a couple, I’m pretty clueless.
Checking attendance and having daily HW busywork is the norm in HS, but it is not as common in colleges, particularly more selective ones where students tend to be self-motivated to do well. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a non-lab college class that graded on attendance. However, I have taken many engineering classes that supported students viewing the class remotely, from as far away as HP Barcelona. I completed one of my MS degrees at Stanford while living and working full time in SD. I was even able to do a final project presentation remotely from SD.
It’s a similar idea with daily HW assignments. I’ve taken classes that had regular group problem sets, and I’ve also taken classes in which only the midterm and final contributed to the grade. The problem sets were rarely busy work. Instead they were often key to understanding the material… focusing on understanding the concepts and applying those concepts in new ways, rather than just regurgitating what appears in the textbook. So the time to the complete the problem sets had a strong negative correlation with how well you (or persons in your group) understood the material.
College classes typically present a syllabus in the first lecture and/or have it online. If you don’t like the grading system or use of HW, in many cases, you can choose a different class.
There are some subjects where “homework” is necessary. Math, foreign language and accounting comes to mind. And it is not busywork.
A quick vent:
It’s been my own and my kids’ experience that professors do not let kids know exactly where they stand when it’s finals time - grades aren’t yet all in and visible to the student. So how hard to study for that final or HOW much time to devote to that final paper is a shot in the dark.
I’ll assume that this is not a complaint about an online gradebook, if such a thing exists in college, being updated if the student has all the data. Then the student can just do the math.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I study for a final, my goal is to get close to 100 (or at least the high end of the curve), not just to eke out the A. Not knowing where they stand because the curve is not transparent sounds too much like the incessant posts we have here in May about what is the cutoff for a 5 on AP XYZ.
Now, if the student does not know where s/he stands because of ungraded assignments, then that’s a valid point.
@OHMomof2 I calculate what I need myself if possible. Most professors I’ve had are willing to tell students what they’re at going into the final, though.
They (Moodle, etc) exist at both of my kid’s’ colleges and in both cases were rarely updated. So yes, that’s what I meant.
Not every semester and every professor, but often enough to be annoying to both kids.
@CharlotteLetter
Had a great English teacher for Speech class at an engineering college. He had gone to Harvard on the GI bill after WWII. Prior to military service he had been a Jazz musician and peanut vendor working the streets of Boston with a monkey on his shoulder as he ground out tunes on his barrel organ. He loved Shakespeare and graduated with highest honors but was never able to earn his Doctorate. After two years in the PhD program, an English professor pulled him aside and confided that they would never confer a PhD in English to a student with a heavy Boston street dialect.
What a great way to start a speech class. We laughed and learned the entire semester. It never dawned on me you could actually ask for a grade! I don’t believe he would have passed them out. He struck me as incorruptibly honest.
:bz