<p>Regarding explanations for final grades, it is usually incumbent on the undergraduate student to be proactive to go to the Prof or write a polite email asking for that explanation. Even at my LAC, the Professor isn’t usually going to bring up the conversation unless the student initiates it. </p>
<p>Expecting it to be provided unbidden strikes me as a bit odd, especially considering in the college level, there is a greater expectation for students to be more proactive about asking about and keeping track of their academic progress compared with K-12. </p>
<p>When you treat other people harshly, all you are teaching them is how to treat someone else harshly. The only thing this teacher succeeded in teaching Mr. 89.9 is that the world is full of jerks and that jerks hold power. Mr. 89.9 is then tempted to become a jerk. Then teachers wonder why students and parents hate them. Then those same teachers wonder why parents won’t support ballot initiatives to increase funding. It’s because they have to save their money to pay for tutors so that their kids don’t have to suffer as a result of Mrs. I don’t round up’s inferiority complex.</p>
<p>D’s experience has run the gamut, wrt grading practices, such that no single practice came to seem particularly odd. Professors seemed to have LOTS of discretion in providing feed-back, and some seemed quite meticulous in keeping students updated on their progress throughout the semester as well as at the end, even unbidden. </p>
<p>In other classes, grading seemed to be a big black box and students had to be very proactive if they wanted to find out how they were doing in a class or track down a professor to question a grade. </p>
<p>The usual expectation, however, was that work that was not assigned a letter or number grade was graded on a pass/fail basis, with students told in advance what they would need to do to get a passing grade. “Participation” generally fell into this category, especially if there were several graded exams and homework assignments.</p>
<p>Also, it is difficult to ask to discuss a grade in detail if there is nothing in writing for reference (paper, exam, list of expectations for an oral presentation or participation), and I suspect that this made students reluctant to ask detailed questions, especially at the end of the term when there is no possibility to improve performance.</p>
<p>Getting back to OP, D did have a couple of classes in college, in which the professor announced in advance that they would round up a final grade if it appeared that a student had made efforts to be engaged in the classwork, giving specific examples of how this would be evaluated. </p>
<p>People with this level of entitlement mentality are probably going to be shocked when they find themselves in employment situations or certain types of graduate/professional education where “almost” and “soo close” just won’t cut it. </p>
<p>If the “almost” or “so close” results in liability for a given company/client or substantial financial losses…especially if it is in the millions or higher, getting a negative employee performance evaluation will be the least of your worries. </p>
<p>And even harder to understand why so many contemporary universities delegate so much of the complexities of teaching and grading to TAs or GSIs who are barely more qualified than their peer students. </p>
<p>Of course, the view from the classroom is quite different from the top of the ivory tower. </p>
That just changes who is complaining about the cutoff … so at your school is the student with a 89.41. Wherever the cutoff is someone is going to just miss.</p>
<p>How is it fair to students to have an extra grade that you can manipulate however you want to adjust their grade to match whatever your perception of them happens to be? I would think a participation grade would be added in weekly and be averaged in like any other grade, not used as a tool to punish or reward students. If you “know” kid x is an “A” student and kid y is a “B” student, why bother grading them at all? Just assign them the grade you’ve already determined they deserve. The problem with your method is that you’re not really grading their participation; you’re making the participation match whatever grade you want to give them. </p>
Most students don’t fall right near the grade borders. They will be quite clearly within the range of B or A- or whatever. For those that DO fall near the border the instructor has to make a decision somehow. I can totally understand fireandrain’s policy of trying to move their average to a clear value of 89 or 90 so that students don’t feel like they just missed a higher grade by a tiny fraction and set out to complain like the OP of this thread. </p>
<p>At my current position, I enter all the grades on Blackboard and it computes a percentage for me by whatever breakdown I have specified. At the end of the semester, I still have to look at each student’s situation to see whether some adjustment of the numbers is in order or not, although I never adjust anyone DOWN.</p>
I pretty much agree with this. Personally, I’m really tired of people who “don’t suffer fools gladly” and those who tell me that “life isn’t fair.” I’d like to live in a kinder, fairer world, and I try to be a kind, fair person. I don’t respect anybody who thinks that makes me a sap.</p>
<p>Of course, as I pointed out above, it’s possible that the kid with 89.9 is a jerk himself, and has burned up any hope of compassion from this particular teacher because of his own jerkiness. So the specific situation may or may not fit the generalization.</p>
<p>I don’t quite understand how giving a kid an 89.9 when he got an 89.9 qualifies a teacher as a jerk. You aren’t treating the student harshly. You are simply not doing the student a favor. Why should a teacher do a student a favor? If he didn’t receive credit to get a 90, why give him a 90?</p>
<p>For those of you complaining about the idea of “arbitrary” grading, I would say that the fairest outcome is not always the most rigid. I teach English. I think my grades are pretty fair. But even if you try to stick to a rubric, there’s no magic way to determine with 100 % confidence that a particular paper deserves a B + rather than an A -. Certainly, I’m not going to try to parse the difference between an 87 and an 88. So if at the end of the semester I have two students whose paper grades were B +, B +, and A-, I’m going to have to think about their performances in a slightly more holistic way, since the grades will come out differently if I enter them as an 87, 87, and 91 than if I enter them as an 89, 89, and 92. In my own case, I’m likelier to give the boost to the student whose papers were more intellectually ambitious, on the rationale that those students have essentially set a harder task for themselves than someone playing it safer.That’s necessarily something of a judgment call, but it isn’t simply a matter of deciding I like one student better than the other - it is a response to actual differences, as is, by the way, the boost given to a student who really worked hard to improve, vs. the senior whose performance started to taper off as second semester drew to a close. </p>
<p>Much of this wouldn’t apply in a class with more objective standards. But it still strikes me as fair to take into account things like grade trends. If a student with an 89.5 really ended the semester as a consistent A - but had done poorly on one early exam, I could see rounding up, but declining to do so in most other cases. Even numbers don’t always tell the whole story -as most of us acknowledge in the case of holistic admissions standards for colleges. </p>
People seem to dislike the idea of subjectivity, but even in Physics courses there is a lot of room for subjectivity in the grading. How much should I make this exam problem worth? How much of it did you really indicate that you understood? Do I take off one point for a math error, or just half a point? You and Suzy made the same basic attempt at this problem - does one of you deserve more partial credit than the other for some subtle difference? Sometimes, I don’t grade the labs on any real rubric, giving everyone who took part 100%. Overall, I feel that I have a great many opportunities for points in the class and a great deal of partial credit. And students can get points even if they just ride the coattails of their group. If I were to say, considering all that, that I was not rounding anyone UP, how does it make me a jerk?</p>
<p>I continue to think that if a school has no policy on rounding, failing to round 89.913 to 90 is jerky behavior by somebody who likes to exert power–unless the kid did something to deserve denial of the benefit of the doubt. In my opinion, justice should be tempered with mercy, and rounding this score up requires such a tiny amount of mercy that only a really rigid person would fail to do so.</p>
<p>Note: the jerkiness of the decision would also depend on what, if anything, this teacher told the students about rounding at the beginning of the semester. If he established a clear policy, I don’t fault him for adhering to it.</p>
<p>The absence of policy on rounding might just indicate that there is NO expected rounding. On the other hand, we can safely assume that there IS a clear grading policy, and that such policy states that an A Minus requires a … 90 or above. And NOT an 89.50 or above. </p>
<p>The OP stated there is some discretion left to the teacher. Obviously this not mean that this discretion should be one that automatically rounds scores. The teacher decided that the score deserved a B- and that was the end of it. </p>
<p>Neither the teacher nor the students are jerks because of this. The same could not be said for people who think this is worthy of a long debate at the school. For all we know, the student might have benefitted from generous roundings in other classes. In the end, this is much ado about nothing and just some high school drama. </p>
<p>Pragmatically speaking, moving on is the better than raging a war that is not worth fighting. </p>
<p>My D once had something like the OP’s kid’s grade in a class (and because she can see her grades online, she knew it before the semester ended). She went to the teacher and asked if there was any extra credit or additional work that she could do to get the grade rounded up. He gave her some and she did it. I suppose this is only an option if you know before the grade is final. </p>