<p>Octoberdana, I’ll bet your D has other talents and interests besides math. She will get past the required math courses, then she can shine in her main pursuits. In my day, I took only one quarter of math (statistics) for my arts degree. I hope it all works out very soon. Good luck!</p>
<p>Octoberdana, when a thread gets long, sometimes there are tangents. Not every comment is directed at the efforts your daughter may or may not have put forth. I’m sorry if you read my comment about my remedial students as a comment about your daughter.</p>
<p>However, I would like to point out that you’ve had several posters tell you that the nature of remedial classes in college is different. There may be higher standards for passing/progressing because a student must be prepared for the nest level and credit may or may not be awarded. You keep going back to the unfairness of having passing placed at 80. I think you’ll be forever convinced the policy is unfair.</p>
<p>17 years of experience as a teacher has given her a bully pulpit to tell the world that those who are not teachers have no idea what a sacrifice teachers make. It has probably given her a paid sabbatical and a pension that the average private sector worker would kill for.</p>
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<p>Sometimes.</p>
<p>Another pattern that I have seen is that a student may have become confused about something basic when learning math – perhaps during Algebra 1 or even earlier – and never had that misconception corrected. Some such students can limp through years of subsequent math courses, never quite understanding what’s going on but always managing to pass. </p>
<p>For example, a student who was absent the week when students were taught the basic principle that would enable them to understand why x + x = 2x might struggle for years.</p>
<p>ordinarylives: I think our issue is that the policy isn’t really written out and the handbook and the counselor led daughter to believe that this was a true pass/fail as definded on the school’s website.</p>
<p>Since it is obviously different it should be labeled as such to avoid this problem for others. The course description should list that the class is S/F but requires an 80% to receive a passing grade. But it is listed as a S/F and that is what caused the problem.</p>
<p>In addition, EVERY student who takes this class should be treated exactly the same and there shouldn’t be sections getting a P for anything above an F and other sections being required to have an 80% to pass. I don’t know if dd will look into whether it is a departmental policy or just this teacher doing what he wants.</p>
<p>It’s ultimately up to her and she is paying very dearly for getting a 79% instead of an 80%.</p>
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Can you quote that sentiment from somewhere in this thread?
I’m going to assume you are not talking about me, since it’s pretty well known here that I’m an adjunct and have never had benefits of any kind until the past year when I’m actually part of the state university teachers union and qualify for a few benefits, none of which are sabbaticals or pensions, lol.</p>
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<p>Were none of these things made clear in the syllabus at the start of the semester?</p>
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<p>Obviously different from what?</p>
<p>It was listed as a S/F course. The percent needed to be “S” is determined by the professor. There is no university-wide policy.</p>
<p>Have you actually SEEN the syllabus? Does it not say you need an 80% to pass? If it does, I’m not sure what the problem is. The expectations were clearly laid out and your D failed to meet them.</p>
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<p>No, that’s not how it works. Sections are taught by different professors and thus have different grading policies. </p>
<p>You’re stuck on the idea that somehow a 90% = A, 80% = B, etc. That’s NOT how it works all the time. I’ve had classes where 79% or lower is failing. Different classes = different expectations.</p>
<p>But two students taking the SAME class taught by DIFFERENT Professors it is somehow okay that the student getting a 79% in Professor A’s class receives a PASS and the student getting a 79% in Professor B’s class receives a FAIL? And gets a permanent F on their transcript? Where the other student got the exact same percentage gets to pass and has no ill effect? Are Professors given that kind of leeway in other classes? In one section of French 1 could one professor make an A an 80% and another professor in a section of French 1 could make an 80% a C?</p>
<p>I’m sorry but in no world that does make sense. Professors should have some latitude but there should also be some consistency otherwise a college GPA would be dependent more on luck of the draw with Professors than the students efforts.</p>
<p>And yes I understand that she failed to meet this Professor’s expectations… she will not be taking anymore Pass/Fail classes at this institution… she has learned her lesson believe me. She is paying very dearly for missing it by one point…</p>
<p>My college had specific criteria for P/F, A, B, etc. that all Professors had to apply. The college set the policy and it was published and all students were aware of it. This is my first experience with it being a Professor free for all and I’m just trying to wrap my head around it.</p>
<p>octoberdana- I don’t know if this will make you feel “better”, but at my son’s state flagship, there were several sections of honors engineering “survey”. It is normally a rather easy pas/fail. Except for his section. It was very tough and he got a letter grade which he had to work very hard for. Fair? Does it matter? He started with the complaints of “unfairness” many times. I just let him vent . He just has to work to succeed within the hand he was dealt. As your daughter and my son learn the system they can take sections with profs they want.</p>
<p>Yes if nothing else DD has learned that if the Professor is too hard she can just keep dropping the class until she gets a Professor that is easier. Perhaps that would have been good in this situation but with this being her first semester unfortunately she didn’t realize and now she will always have an F on her transcript.</p>
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<p>IME, this the exception rather than the norm. Professors are generally able to set their own grading criteria.</p>
<p>I am late to this thread and I am sorry if I missed this…but does her school offer freshman forgiveness? Some schools let you erase a few classes and retake them…exactly due to confusing situations like this.</p>
<p>I think it depends on whether or not the sections were given precisely the same assignments. If not, then an 80 in one section may simply not mean the same thing as an 80 in another. Yes, sometimes one professor is more difficult than another. That’s life, and not even a particularly unfair part of it. Grading normally involves some level of judgment, and even in a math course, where the grading itself might be fairly clear-cut, so too does determining an assignment’s precise level of difficulty. Short of giving professors no power to set their own assignments, there is always going to be some variability in difficulty level and severity of grading. As long as the grades in one class aren’t such an outlier that those grades bear no reference to the standards used elsewhere, I don’t think that’s a problem, unfortunate as it might be for the student who gets a lower grade.</p>
<p>In fact, changing the threshold for a passing grade might in certain cases be far fairer than the alternative. Suppose your daughter’s section had 20 students and she was the only student who scored below an 80, whereas in the other professor’s section, eight out of twenty students scored below an 80. Assuming there wasn’t some anomaly affecting student quality, that would suggest that professor B’s exams were probably harder. If the two professors both set an 80 as the minimum for passing, the mothers of those eight students might then say, with some justice, that if only their daughters had been in Professor A’s class, they probably would have been able to meet that benchmark.</p>
<p>You’re still hung up on the idea that 79 = C+, when that just isn’t always the case. In the same way that in a very difficult class, a 40 % on an exam might be curved to a “B,” in a very easy class, a 79 might be failing because demonstrating below an 80 % competency of the material isn’t enough to justify granting college credit. I also don’t think your D was given bad advice, even though it turned out to have bad consequences. If your D had trouble in this class, she presumably would have had a lot more trouble in the upper level one. The adviser was banking on the fact that there was a better chance that your daughter was going to pass the lower level class than that she would do decently in the higher level class. She turned out to be wrong, but it wasn’t a bad bet.</p>
<p>I think the language of the syllabus is crucial here. I do agree that if there was never any indication that a pass might require more than a 60 or at most 70 %, it isn’t fair to blindside a student who thought she was in comfortable passing range by announcing the scale at the end of the semester. I wouldn’t avoid P/F courses in the future; I would just be very clear on the definition of P in the future. I suspect the scale in more difficult courses wouldn’t be so unforgiving anyway.</p>
<p>Octoberdana, your D can recover from this. Some people just have a real mental block when it comes to certain concepts, no matter how hard they work (and I agree that casting aspersions on your D’s work ethic is totally uncalled for). The good news is that once she does pass a math class - which, as she was so close this time, she’ll be able to do - she’ll probably never have to worry about it again, although if her math skills are that poor, it might be worth getting some private tutoring just for the sake of understanding the subject, quite apart from any class.</p>
<p>I agree that whether this is an injustice or not is dependent on what the syllabus says. If this expectation was not set out clearly at the beginning, then it is not fair to spring it on students later in the term, when it is too late for them to drop a class. </p>
<p>I’ll preface this next part with the acknowledgement that I’ve had no experience with remedial math classes and don’t know any kids personally who had to take them. That said, it seems to me that, to be useful, remedial math classes should be taught by people who have an understanding for math processing disabilities and how to overcome them. </p>
<p>I was lucky- I always <em>got</em> math, but I did know people who didn’t get it the way the teacher explained it. People for whom math comes easily are not usually very tolerant or understanding of those who don’t get it. Algebra involves abstract concepts and some people cannot think abstractly. They need it brought down to a concrete level. They need to understand why it works, not just told that it does. People do that with us with simple addition. We use apples- If Sally has 5 apples and Joe has 3, then together they have 8 apples. It’s concrete. You can draw it. That’s not true with x or y or z. The very fact that letters represent numbers is abstract. I was lucky to be able to look at a quadratic equation and know very quickly, with little computation, how to factor it out. I don’t know how I would teach that to someone because it came naturally to me. </p>
<p>My son is excellent in math and would be a horrible math teacher. He got almost failing grades in second grade when they had to do estimating because he could look at 1342 + 495 and give the exact answer with no computation so estimating made no sense to him. Why would you make it 1300 + 500 when it is so obviously 1837? Why would you purposely give a wrong answer? That was the most illogical thing he’d ever heard, at age 7…lol. Math concepts are so obvious to him that he would never be tolerant with someone who didn’t understand them. </p>
<p>It seems to me, on a philosophical level, remedial math should be taught by special ed teachers, not TAs.</p>
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<p>I agree with you that this is horrendously unfair and perhaps grounds for some kind of complaint. IF if they did the same exams and the same assignments.</p>
<p>It’s not unfair if 80% on a hard exam is a pass in one class, and 80% on an easy exam is a fail in another. But I do agree that if they are taking the exact same exam, this is a problem.</p>
<p>Do you know for certain that they completed the same tests/homeworks/etc?</p>
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Professors have a lot more latitude than you might be inclined to want them to. Also, I don’t think we know at this point that there are sections of your D’s course where 60% is passing and others where it takes an 80%. </p>
<p>This year I taught a 2-course pre-engineering sequence for engineering tech majors. The first course is difficult, the second is one of the most difficult most of them will take. There is another professor who teaches the same sequence in alternating semesters (so this fall I had Part 2 and he had Part 1). He is notorious for his extreme curving of the grades. Students can pass without getting anything out of it at all. </p>
<p>Last spring in Part 1 I didn’t curve AT ALL and failed 1/4 of the class. This semester I applied a modest curve which still resulted in failing 1/4 of the class. I think my failure rate is much higher than his, but I would not teach the courses if I were forced to apply a curve I did not think was reasonable. </p>
<p>So yeah, sometimes the luck of the draw with professors has a lot to do with a student’s GRADES. Perhaps inversely so with a student’s LEARNING. If only the students cared about THAT!</p>
<p>^ My DS goes to Georgia Tech. They have something called Course Critique. It lists every class taught broken down by professor by term. The students can go out and look at example Calc II and who teaches it and what each profs breakdown by grade, how many A,B,C,D,F and even withdrawal’s there are. While they can’t avoid the hard profs at least they know going in that Hey this guy’s average GPA is 2.13 for Calc II…So if I get a B I’m doing Okay!</p>
<p>OP- I’d check and see if there is something like that where your daughter goes to school or have her look at “rate my professor .com”. It may help give her a heads up to what her profs are like.</p>
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<p>Sounds like she got what she wanted. She made a mistake on what was required to pass and is now paying the price. This unfortunate thing happens to many freshmen. It sounds like its time to let this go and let her deal with it. It sounds like a lot of assumptions are being made based on only one side of the story. </p>
<p>Please consider that your daughter is under a lot of stress due to her poor performance first semester. She may need to keep up this story line for her own survival (with parents) knowing full well that you have no power to ever know for sure. Whatever the reason for the failing grade, it just seems to be getting too much energy.</p>
<p>How about focusing on ways to help her be successful in the next math class? One thing that I have found with kids that struggle in math (yet really are trying) is, as Sylvan said, their approach. I have not met very many people who are not capable of learning algebra. Sometimes the strugglers spend their time trying to memorize every “type” of problem without taking the time to understand the concept. I don’t think they do this on purpose, they just fail to realize “this” is the real thing holding them back. At a certain point, everything can’t be memorized and all the cards fall down.</p>
<p>If she really is doing all the right things and still can’t get it, I would suggest she be tested for a learning disability.</p>
<p>Well the grade distributions just came out. There were 22 students in the class: 10 Passed, 8 Failed, and 4 withdrew. When more than half the class either FAILS or WITHDRAWS that is a problem, IMO. 45% of the class that didn’t withraw FAILED a S/F class!</p>
<p>Also, on Rate the class sites this class is listed as “incredibly easy to pass.” which I think with this grade distribution proves is flat out wrong or something has drastically changed.</p>
<p>I do know that the tests were the same for all classes, because they were proctored by the different professors and the students could pick the day/time that worked for them.</p>
<p>And yes we are focused on ways to help her be more successful she will be taking her required Math class this summer at the community college where they go slower but the credit will transfer into her main institution.</p>
<p>In addition, we told her that this is not the end of the world, and she says that she feels better about next semester now that she knows more of what to expect. She also said that she learned that she may need to withdraw from a class if it is going to be something that she can’t do. Time will tell…</p>