I did my part of a group assignment 10 days before it was supposed to be put together to submit. Didn’t want to work on it over Thanksgiving break. Not one of my three group members did a single thing for those 10 days. The rest of it got done the day it was due.
I’m so over group projects.
What amazes me is how willing most professors are to help students improve. I took a writing class where I received a “B” on the first paper, then asked the professor what I could do to improve. He said come to office hours and discuss your next assignment, and if you have a draft I’ll make suggestions. A group of students did exactly that and the vast majority improved their marks a letter grade or more by the end of the semester. In another class (engineering), which was also recorded and available for replay, the professor would spend 30-60 minutes after class answering students questions on the (very difficult) homework assignments on top of his office hours. He also gave bonuses for attendance on days like the days before Thanksgiving break.
In my son’s engineering program, they constantly refer to help and tutoring resources, and even have departmental lounges for each discipline staffed by TAs throughout the school week.
Colleges have a vested interest in helping their students succeed, but students have to be part of that.
I agree with @bodangles about group projects - I had uniformly bad experiences in undergrad (except engineering) - lots of no shows , etc. and good ones in grad school.
D had a prof willing to do that for each of her many papers one semester. SO helpful. She became a much better writer in just 3 months.
Yeah, some professors are actually into passing along their knowledge to the young. Who’da thunk it?
^^It’s pretty standard now that in comp classes, all papers go through drafts and revision before the final grade.Each of our major papers have three drafts including the final one. That’s where most of my teaching happens. It takes a lot more time to do paper comments on drafts than on the final version, just for that reason.
This thread is bringing back memories. I was in college in the late 1980’s studying electrical engineering. I was taking a class that was very difficult and had the reputation as the weeder course for EE. Long before checking grades online, we had to go to the professor’s office to see final grades posted outside his door (posted by student number for privacy). As I was standing there looking at my grade, the professor walked out and asked me how I did. I told him I got an A on the final but a B in the class. He said, “hmmmm, let me check my grade book… Oh, yes, you have a B average.” I replied, “I thought you said you were going to drop the lowest grade.” (I bombed the first exam and did very well the rest of the semester.) His response, “I changed my mind.” And that was the end of that. I would have never dreamed of begging him to change my grade. I suspect the curve was too high, so he kept the lowest score.
In the early 90’s, I was in grad school and a TA for an undergrad Digital Design class. Each TA was required to write questions for the exams. One of the questions I wrote was to write some code to perform a specific task. It was a pretty straightforward If/Then/Else scenario that could be written with a few lines of code. Students were writing two pages of code and later that night were calling the professor at home complaining that the exam was too hard. After the exams were graded, the professor went through every question and solution with the class (using an overhead projector, lol). When he got to my question and posted my solution, there were many groans. Then he showed the class a more elegant solution which consisted of one line of code. Even louder groans!
I was dumfounded to hear that students were calling the professor at home. Never in my life would I have done that.
When my daughter was in 6th grade, she came home with a 70 (7 out of 10 questions correct) on a science test and she was devastated. I went through it with her and saw that she had answered one question incorrectly, but that it was necessary to use that answer in calculating the answer for two more questions. Even though she had done those calculations correctly, there was no way to get the right answer. I encouraged her to talk to her teacher and explain what happened. I also told her that the teacher might change her grade, or she might not. When she got home I asked her how it went and she said the teacher gave her a 90 and also collected the rest of the tests so she could regrade them. I hope that taught her that she could advocate for herself, but she had to have a good reason to question her grade.
^^ And as a teacher-- a math teacher in particular-- I absolutely agree with both the approach and result. Most math teachers I know grade that way-- we take the error and follow it through. In fact, on last week’s big exam, I actively urged my Precalc kids to fake the part they got stuck on. If they got stuck in the middle of a problem and, say, couldn’t factor, fake the factoring and continue the problem (as opposed to just stopping and leaving the rest blank. ) I said that I knew the answers; that what I was looking for was evidence that they knew the process involved in solving the problem. They would lose out on the points for the factoring component. But if the rest of the problem was solved correctly, regardless of how bizarre the final answer, they would receive the bulk of the credit for the problem.
And I also appreciate that you taught your 6th grade daughter to advocate for herself, to politely make a case for the points she had earned.
I think that’s light years away from asking for extra, unearned points.
I am taking some classes at a large, local U and am quite surprised at some of the changes in grading since I was in school many years ago. First, attendance counts. I hate that. Yes, I do attend class, but I feel like I am an adult whose attendance should not be monitored. Maybe some students pass because they always show up? It is possible. Second, there are more opportunities for students to get help. There are tutoring services for math and writing and professors and TAs encourage students to write and submit rough drafts. One class even allowed students to rewrite one paper for a higher grade. (There were rules about how to do it and when it applied.)
In my observation, only the better students took advantage of the rough draft option. They were older, more organized, not likely to be in any academic peril. More students took advantage of the rewrite option and some of these were weak.
Garland, I thought of you. This big, public U has a wide variety of students and I was glad the weaker ones had a chance to improve their skills. But it is different from the system I had when I was in school back when we wrote two or three papers per class and got little feedback.
When our professor returned tests in a fluid mechanics class, I realized he’d graded my exam incorrectly and gave me a higher score than I deserved. I sighed and showed it to him. I was really hoping he would say, “Oh, that’s OK, I won’t change your grade,” but he didn’t respond that way! The lower test score meant I got an A- in his class instead of an A. But at least I could live with myself.
The only professor I was tempted to complain about was a guy visiting from another school. He taught a tough steel design class and did a horrible job. The low point was when, at the beginning of a test, he announced, “I know I said this was going to be an open book test, but I changed my mind. Close your books.” I have rarely been so furious! The irony is that I picked him over another professor because that one was known to be hard. But he was a world famous engineer in his area, and I really should have sucked it up and signed up for his class.
@bethanylm291 , that professor “changing mind” happened to my dw in 90s. She felt it as a betrayal of contract and filed an appeal to department, only to learn the absolute power of a professor over class no matter what. Hopefully the trouble at least made him hesitating changing his mind again to his future students. We taught our dd to respect but never completely trust a professor for unwritten words regarding grading. Dw is still sour about that after 20 years.
During my senior year I took a required pharmacology class.
While taking the midterm, which was multiple choice, I noticed that one question had no right answer. I went up to the professor and explained, one by one, why none of the 4 answers was correct. He then said what the right one was, but I told him where in the text he could find the reason that answer was also incorrect. He left the room to check it out, then returned and nodded to me that I was right.
The only fair thing would have been to eliminate that question when grading the exam, but instead he marked everyone except me wrong on that question-- his reason being that “they should have known”.
At the end of term, he told the class the final would be multiple choice. We arrived at the exam to find it was 3 hours’ worth of essays.
I’m glad the era of profs just changing their mind like that is over. “The syllabus is a contract” goes both ways.
That really isn’t true. Some classes don’t have a syllabus, unfortunately.
And some professors simply don’t include information on their syllabus aside from their contact information and/or office, course title and meeting times, and the Title IX statement. One syllabus gave the following information about course content: “Homework will be assigned and there may be exams.”
I find that shocking, to be honest. My own university prescribes what needs to be in the syllabus. It’s not much, but things like this must be.
Yeah, I’m shocked too–our syllabi are checked by the higher ups before the class starts. We got about four/five pages of stuff that has to be covered, besides the schedule, and the schedule is considered pretty much set in stone except for minor changes.
Of the classes I’ve taken, the only syllabi that exceed one page are for classes over which the department has very heavy control. I’ve taken gen ed, accounting, French, math, stats, and programming courses, and of those, only gen ed and French classes always have details, such as the schedule and summaries of assignments. Very few of my math, stats, accounting, and programming classes have any or all of those, and 1-2 (out of ~20 classes) used published grading scales (which would be ok if we were told that the class is graded on a curve - rarely the case).
I’m all for abiding by grading policies set forth in the syllabus, because that means the professor cares enough about grading to put it IN the syllabus.
Curious about different experiences with syllabus/i – my college kids have never had one which is less than 5 pages, and they have all identified the learning outcomes, schedule of assignments, percentage of grading for each type of assignment, explanation of grading scale, expectations, academic honesty etc. And that is from a public flagship for one kid and a LAC for the other.
My D’s flagship has detailed syllabi for each class, all which must be published by beginning of the term. It’s great for evaluating courses before registering initially and during drop/add.
Wow–I’m impressed that you folks have seen your kids’ syllabi. I don’t think I ever saw one from either of mine when they were in school.