My kid’s college doesn’t. Students are expected to keep track of their own work.
@Sue22 I think that’s healthier. The LMS’s allow students to obsess over minor fluctuations in grades and also promotes grade-grubbing and grade-gaming. I think it’s had a really negative effect that they are so pervasive. In general, the whole tally mark notion of grades with the rubrics and the percentages has been a really negative experience for students, I think. Students are so used to a fill in the blank education now.
Zero sympathy from me. Your daughter could have asked someone what the dashes meant.
It is a learning moment and she just needs to move on,
Also I disagree with any advice that includes you as a the parent contacting anyone about this.
In one of my college classes, my professor posted the wrong due date for the final exam project in the syllabus and didn’t update us. She marks off 2% for each day an assignment is late; I got a 88 instead of 98 on my final exam because I was misinformed. My grade is now a B+ instead of the A it should have been.
I wasn’t the only one. There were seven people who this also affected, and my class is small.
It happens. I don’t feel like arguing with my professor on it. Their break starts tomorrow. She still has to grade one of my assignments and I fear putting that bad blood in there will for sure keep my grade a B+ instead of a little hope that it will raise to a A.
Actually, as of now she has missed at least two.
College is not the same as high school. Sure, when she was living at home and going to high school, she was a perfect student. But time management gets tougher in college.
That’s not how real life works. There are all sorts of things, little and big, that are confusing or unclear and little traps for the unwary. Small print on contracts. Obscure tax deductions and write-offs. Laws with loopholes. Rules with exceptions.
So that real-world fact of not everything being spelled out and explained also ends up being part of what differentiates people who seem to sail through life without problems … and people who seem to have one mishap after another. Most people are somewhere in between. But the proactive people are the ones who catch the mistakes before there are negative consequences. And the proactive people are often the ones who become aware of or even create opportunities for themselves before others learn about them – for example, finding out about a job opening before it’s been posted.
So if you want to come here to vent… fine. But I hope for her sake that your daughter is accepting responsibility and moving on. Because things are only going to get tougher going forward, with more things to keep track of and more things that can potentially go wrong.
If I were hiring am undergrad student for a research position, I would want someone who was detail-oriented and careful about systems and procedures – the kind of person who would double check to make sure things were done correctly. Because little mistakes in a lab setting cause big problems – it can entirely undermine the validity of a study. So while it is true that seeing the grade alone doesn’t give much information – I think it’s a mistake to think that some assignments are busy work that are less important or significant than others.
I hope your daughter does get the positions she wants – her B+ isn’t fatal – but the attitude and response to it could be a problem.
Particularly when it’s really a B+.
I think Blackboard is pretty straightforward. The assignments appear in order (by due date) and they all start with a description followed by dashes. When you submit an assignment you get an email notification, the word “submitted” appears on the assignment bar in Blackboard under the description, and the dashes are eventually replaced by a grade. You said your daughter had been checking the subsections, so unless her version of the program works differently she should have seen that two earlier assignments were missing the “submitted” notification. Did she check her email to verify that she submitted them?
It sounds like your daughter was busy and just didn’t realize the assignments were due. That’s unfortunate, but I wouldn’t blame it on the professor or dismiss them as being inconsequential busy work either. A category that’s worth 30% of the grade is a major portion of the grade, not a grade booster. Those types of assignments test organization and attention to detail, so she really needs to develop an effective way to track them.
She might not think it’s a big deal to make up two short assignments that she apparently doesn’t think are important. But at our university if a professor gives that option to one student (without a medical issue or family emergency) they’re required to offer it to all of them. If they have multiple students who are each missing a couple of assignments that can quickly become a burden. If this is her major department I would tread carefully. She earned the grade she was given. If they allow her to make up the assignments they’re doing her a favor. I think it’s a mistake to blame them and it could hurt her in the long run. Recommendations are about more than just grades.
I think your D did right to complain and then escalate to the department head, that was good self advocacy, but I am afraid this is the end. I have used Blackboard and looked at it today. It shows when you submit something. In fact, in the version I use, it sends an email to the student when the submission goes in. So there is a record. Now, it is possible the prof is sloppy about using Blackboard and didn’t post course requirements/assignments in a timely fashion. I have seen that happen, too, when the prof doesn’t put all the assignments on BB in the beginning. And it is possible that your student hadn’t used BB before and so was clueless about how it worked and how to read it.
It was worth it to appeal, especially given that your D did so well in the course on tests. A different prof might have said you are a freshman and didn’t understand BB. I will use my discretion and overlook your failure to send in these two small asignmets, but next time, you need to know xyz." I am afraid this is a learning experience.
As stated earlier, my daughter has learned from her mistake and how the system works. Also, I didn’t call it “busy work,” others did. And she is very detail oriented as stated by her past teachers so this was a very unfortunate worst way to drop the ball. We know this isn’t high school and she never said the assignments weren’t important. Yes - a big slip up and no - not a deal breaker in her career goals.
@Lizardly Thanks - She is a very driven and motivated person that she will get into a lab research - this has just thrown a curve ball into her immediate plans.
This comment is more for the benefit of some of the other posters, not the OP, who has surely been advised enough:
There are a number of posts talking about the professor’s sloppiness, lax grading habits, poorly set up gradebook. There is ZERO evidence any of that is true. It seems very clear that the professor GRADED WHAT WAS SUBMITTED. Sorry for caps, but really, the idea that it is up to the professor to indicate to someone that they missed an assignment is problematical, and there is no evidence that submitted assignments were not being graded. So can we stop talking about laxness, or sloppiness, on the part of the prof?
I sure hope some of you aren’t sending your students to complain about things like this. It’s not a good look.
Hear, Hear, garland! Too much ‘us vs them’ and they’re wrong, it can’t possibly be me or my kid. This isn’t hs (and many hs teachers won’t give an inch, either. ) This is the leap to college.
I am taking some classes at a local U so am sympathetic to the OP. It took me a little bit to figure out Blackboard and I have had profs who were slow and yes sloppy about putting assignments on BB. I don’t mean grading them; I mean posting them, announcing that there is an assignment and this is how to turn it in. Profs make mistakes, too. The school I attend is a big public, but one that attracts many older and working students, including many vets. It is a very diverse population, with many first gen and low income students as well. I think that for all these reasons professors are more forgiving of student mistakes.
I haven’t asked for any special treatment myself, but know of conscientious, reasonable students, including older students, who have and have been given a little help. One woman, for example, screwed up in turning something in on Blackboard, alerted the prof, and was able to email it in a few days later. I think it was worth talking to the prof and even the department head.
I think it’s fine for the student to have talked to the prof and the department head … but the difference in your example is that the woman who screwed up took steps to fix the problem within a few days.
This isn’t a case of a student who submitted paperwork that somehow didn’t get transmitted. It’s the case of a student who failed to submit two assignments, probably because she was busy and didn’t remember.
I don’t know whether the student has accepted this outcome, but the parent is still dwelling on it here.
It is not the fault of the e-tracking system that the student didn’t submit the assignments in question.
@calmom See Post #108
@skieurope In the days before online posting of grades, it was harder to know one’s grades but students always had the opportunity to meet with the professor to learn grades. Now that grades CAN be posted online, the professor also has a responsibility to do it right and to have an understanding of what the “student view” of these systems look like. The professor is trying to convey information. How is that information being received?
In the present age, the problem that this student faced is the result of three issues (in my view): First, it seems as though that grade category is weighted awfully heavily that two missed scores brought the entire course grade down a full letter grade. Second, the professor did indeed fail to keep up with his/her side of this online reporting bargain, which is to report/post grades in a timely fashion. Third, the professor did not take care in learning the online system well enough to know what the absence of recorded grades would LOOK like to the student.
Sure, ultimately, this is the student’s responsibility, but professors have responsibilities too, to construct grading schemes that weight various items in a logical way, to keep up with posting grades, and to learn the online grade system well enough to KNOW what the student is seeing. My bet is that the professor had no clue that the student view would be misleading.
There is not much the student can do now, except write out carefully what has happened, SHOW the professor the actual screen shots of the online grade reporting system to show the professor what it looks like to the student when a grade is not entered, and ask every so nicely for reconsidering. The argument can be made that they both have learned an important lesson and wouldn’t it be nice if the student did not pay the full price. The student could consider arguing that perhaps one of the two zeroes could be dropped or in some way, the final course grade be adjusted to a BA. Although it is true that life isn’t always fair, it is not necessary for this professor to offer up the lesson, in the very first semester of college that “life is often unfair and you’re on your own, kid.”
My final conclusion is that there is a big flaw in the system–that dash of missed work should show immediately as a zero if that is the case and tally it into the grade that is tabulated continuously.
OP’s D was relying on a system to track her grade that has a big glitch in it. Systems should be made for the users instead of the system blaming people for not knowing its intricacies.
@adlgel I totally agree that this suggests a web design imperfection, along with the likelihood that the professor did not know what the student view would really look like. It is very easy to say that the student should have known…of COURSE she should have known! And ultimately, it is her responsibility. But the folks who design these blackboard systems get paid a ton of money to make them useful and they are only useful if they convey information in a way that the students can understand. Systems throughout our lives are designed to accommodate human error and this blackboard system could too.
I’d guess that most professors know just enough about these systems to post grades. It is tough to know what the student is seeing.
I just think that, given that the October grade was posted so late and given that the “display” of the information for the students is a bit incomplete, it would be nice if the professor would be flexible. At the end of the day, most professors want to reward their best students with the best grades.
@profdad2021 – funny that we posted at the same time!
@garland It is not necessary to accuse the professor of sloppiness (or more awful conduct!) to just say this:
The professor uses this online system to convey information. The student failed to do two assignments (her bad) and the online system did not convey this information well. Yes, it seems as though the info WAS there, but seems that it was easy to miss the evidence of the missed assignments.
I am a professor. I use online grading systems to communicate grades to my students. If this had happened in MY class, I would feel a little badly. That is my main point. I would recognize that there was a design flaw with the online system and it was exacerbated by my not posting the zeroes in a way that the student RECEIVED that information. These online systems seem ever so useful but they do have their limitations.
I would try to work something out with the student, rather than be completely rigid and assign 100% of responsibility on her with such a substantive penalty. There are lots of professors like me, who have rules and expect students to take responsibility yet, yet, still recognize that we live lives of imperfection and learning.
The professor allowed the dropping of the lowest grade as part of the course description…so one of those zeros was not counted…IIRC.
The student missed two assignments…and never thought to question between assignment one and two missed what the deal was…considering the other similar assignments had…grades? Sorry…but this is on the student. And the parent says…in post 108 that the student understands and will be more vigilant in the future.