<p>So I failed gym Junior year. I'm officially medically excused but the teacher won't change the grade because he's lazy. So there's a 55 on my transcript. Is this going to hurt my chances of admissions to college? Should I e-mail my regional rep or something?</p>
<p>Depends on the school. Some schools don't consider pointless classes like gym. But get it changed anyway. Harass your teacher, principal, GC, etc...</p>
<p>Thing is, I tried, and tried...and tried, and then tried some more. The transcripts have been sent out already.</p>
<p>Well, yeah, go ahead and email your regional rep. If you have a doctor's opinion or w/e, ask if you can fax or mail that in.</p>
<p>is gym even included in your gpa or transcript, cuz i know that although i was required to take gym all 4 years, it is not on my transcript or my gpa. i didn't even realize that it had no effect until i randomly glanced at my transcript. so maybe your school does that too.</p>
<p>dude, i would sue</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'm officially medically excused but the teacher won't change the grade because he's lazy.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>There is a bit of a hole in your story, because if you had a *documented * medical excuse as to why you could not take gym at all vs. a doctor's not from missing a few classes (yes, you can be sick, turn a doctor's note and still fail gym because your absenses overall lead to unsatisfactory performance in the class) it would be documented as part of your school record. </p>
<p>In a worse case scenario, you would have never gotten a failing grade because your principal could have over ridden the grade. </p>
<p>Even if you are medically excused form participating, the school may require that you still show up and get prepared even if you sit out activities. If this was the case and you did not do so, the teacher can still fail you.</p>
<p>How is your school handling your failing gym? As you already know failing gym can lead to your not graduating so you will still have to get credit for the failed gym. </p>
<p>Are you taking gym this term or was your medical excuse for that one term? </p>
<p>If you had a medical excuse for gym, why didn't you submit it at the time you were taking gym?</p>
<p>Your e-mailing will look a you are just making an excuse for not taking care of your business. Let your GC handle it for you.</p>
<p>Send a note explaining the situation on a sheet of paper just as if it were an additional essay. Have a label on the top of the sheet with your name, SSN, and a title of "Explanatory Note Concerning Gym Grade".</p>
<p>I agree with sybbie about checking that a failed grade in gym won't keep you from graduating. From my experience with my son who is now a freshman, however, I see it from a slightly different perspective. Often administrators in a school district have absolutely no control over grades. In addition, there is friction between administrators and teachers where teachers will get their backs up just as soon as an administrator even approaches them on a subject like this. Also, teachers sometimes have no idea how what they do can affect college applications. I don't know if they care. At any rate, you need to get your parents involved. The GC is not likely to be a help, but you can try to have him/her send a note to the college explaining the situation. If the principal/assistant principals don't want to get involved, your parents need to press it and take it above the principal. You have no hope on this without your parents.</p>
<p>If you can't get the grade changed, then explain it in your note to the colleges. Certainly do a better job explaining it than you have in your OP. Take full responsibility for anything you can take responsibility for. Try to phrase it so that the adcoms will understand the situation.</p>
<p>I agree with sybbie, altho I don't think any college will care (unless its a military academy). Colleges ignore PE, health, driver's training, etc. -- they care about academic classes, IMO.</p>
<p>did you try getting your parents involved? the adminstratoin at my school is like.. scared of parents, and will do anything if they get yelled at enough</p>
<p>do what my parents did- there was an old grade which a teacher wouldn't fix - so my parents withheld tuition payments for a year until it was fixed !</p>
<p>if your in public - idk.</p>
<p>I agree that it is unlikely that the college will care about the grade, per se. However, I think they might treat it in the same way that they might treat a disciplinary problem. I think it is important to have the grade changed, if possible. If not, it is not the end of the world. At that point, I think you need to get your side of it into an explanatory note. The #1 rule in explanatory notes, though, is to take full responsibilty for everything.</p>
<p>sybbie and bluebayou: If you were the teacher and the OP isn't a complete jerk, would you do this?</p>
<p>It looks bad if it doesn't get changed. In the back of their minds, it's a 55!</p>
<p>In our state, PE is a required course for graduation...four years passed. If you fail PE in this state, you must repeat the course. If you have a medical exemption, there is alternate PE class (things like chess) that you must take instead. If it were ME, I'd be checking to make sure you were going to graduate. In this state an F in PE, unresolved would mean you did not meet the graduation requirements. Plus here...really all you have to do to get a decent grade in PE is to change your clothes and show up. It's a VERY hard course to fail.</p>
<p>We don't have PE at my school, except for a semester (medical magnet school, so we take more health science courses). I remember in middle school our grades were based on: changing into our clothes (so having our clothes), skill level (how well you could do on the 6th weeks' sport, i.e. shooting freethrows, archery hitting the bullseye 3 times, etc.), test over the history of the sport, and the mile time (like 10 minutes or something easy). It seems hard, but it wasn't. Well it wasn't for me because I was determined to get a high grade... :)</p>
<p>Isn't the PE class calculated in your high school GPA, therefore affecting your class rank at your school??.. that is if your school ranks..</p>
<p>OP will have to get a passing grade in gym if s/he expects to graudate because PE passing. 4 years of PE (consisting of PE and health) is a requirement for graduation in the NYC public school system and a NYS requirement..</p>
<p>It is my hope that s/he has connected with their advisor to fill this deficiency even if this means doubling up on gyms or taking the course in night school (you would be suprised at the number of kids who end up not graduating with their class because of gym) because it is something that is a given each of your 4 years in h.s. Op will have to pass 7 semesters of gym and one semester of health in order to graduate.</p>
<p>I think it is going to be harder to have the grade changed at this point because s/he failed the class in june (or probably knew that faling the class was imminent before school let out in june) as was probably given options as to what s/he needed to do in order to get credit.</p>
<p>Hi Dufus,</p>
<p>Regarding your question as to if I were the teacher would I pass OP, my answer would be it depends because I don't think that s/he is telling the full story.</p>
<p>As I stated earlier, there is a difference between getting a doctor's note excusing your absence from gym and getting medical excused from gym. </p>
<p>One of my neices was medically excused from gym because she is an asthmatic but her school still required that she showed up for the period even though there were events that she could not participate in class. </p>
<p>I have known young women who have given birth during, h.s and were medically excused during their pregnancy and after delivery, yet they were still required to show up for the class. </p>
<p>NYC has a mandatory attendance requirement, so even if the sudent was medically excused and failed to show up especially if s/he attended other classes on the same day, they theoretically would have cut gym. This could be the reason for the failure. If this is the case no one is going to help to get the grade changed. </p>
<p>Remember if a parent were to come challenge the grade the teacher would have to show the records to reflect why the student was given a particular grade.</p>
<p>If the medical excuse kept the student out of school all together it would have been handled differently. I think that overall for some reason or another OP did not show up to gym and failed because of absences that the doctor's note did not cover.</p>
<p>I would imagine that the OP's situation is a bureaucratic failure as opposed to actually failing gym. I am totally filling in the blanks, but I imagine that there was a policy where you fail the course if you have an unexcused absence and the excuse had to be in the teacher's hand the day following the absence. In my scenario, the OP had the absence note from a doctor but gave it to the teacher a day late, and therefore failed the class. Now the wonderful thing about humans is that some people would say that it would have been the OP's fault for being a day late, and some people would say that the teacher was an *******. It this is the case, the OP needs to write an explanatory note taking full responsibility for been wrong to the extent he/she was, and then let the adcoms decide about the teacher's actions.</p>
<p>It may be hard for some people on CC to understand the condition of some public schools. I have seen a teacher take 18 weeks to grade a term paper that was turned in before Xmas. I have seen a teacher give a take-home history test where you could use any resources. The teacher copied the test verbatim (including typos) from a website that gave the answers. Then she misgraded the test (4 out of 20 questions) even though the answers were available at the teacher-resource website. The number of similar stories that I have number in the dozens.</p>
<p>Back to the main point, I think the OP needs to:
1) make sure he/she graduates high school
2) send an explanatory note to the adcoms taking responsibility for his/her actions
3) look out for people like the gym teacher in the future</p>