I get a lot of helpful advise from this community so I thought this would be the best place to post. When I started the course I’m in the first assignment was due on paper then every assignment afterwards was due on gradescope (online). First assignment was due Jan 17th and I just got the grade back and received a zero. I turned it in in the homework box and now the professor and ta say they can’t find it. I don’t know how to post pictures here but every other assignment I got a full score on out of the 7 assigned. This actually brought my grade down from an 80 to a 75. I’m not sure what to do I emailed the professor and his response was "I just checked the unclaimed the homework 1 in the file bin outside of
my office door, hasn’t found. You and Yuan [my ta] can try again.
The homework box had been cleaned up and double checked recently. " I worked really hard on that assignment and want my credit, I can’t believe they misplaced my work an put the obligation on me.
How can I go about this? What are my possible option? I am going to go on Monday and search myself in the HW room, but if I don’t find it then idk what to do.
Do you have the original file on your computer? Find it with document properties showing the original date of completion, screenshot it to prove that it did exist at the original date.
I will look I usually take pictures so I will scour through my images.
Talk to your advisor or your dean to see if you can get some help.
I found a picture of a solution to one problem I worked out on my whiteboard and it was taken the day before it was due, and another photo of my solving another problem on my white board but it was taken a about a week after it was due along with a bunch of other similar problems most likely when I was preparing for an exam.
The thing is, this was the only assignment that was actually due in paper - the rest were submitted online. So that is the only photo I have.
okay going to email my advisor right now she is usually super helpful.
The dean is all but useless.
We kind of beat this into my kid’s head in HS to take pics of assignments if it wasn’t a computer file already, because humans are prone to errors and misplace or lose stuff. I hope you get full or partial credit, but I bet you won’t turn in another paper-based assignment again without having a backup copy. Sorry, sometimes life teaches us some cruel lessons.
hell no I wont! I am going to ask him if he can average out my HW score without that one grade. My advisor said there’s nothing she can do. I just don’t know how the assignment was lost… I have full scores in every other assignment so the zero looks really misplaced, hopefully that will help convince the professor to average out my score without the zero - I don’t want this to affect my grade because not only did I work hard on that assignment, but on every subsequent one as well.
The fact that you worked hard (and apparently well, since you got good scores) does not in any way obligate the prof to bend the rules for a single student. Better to have learned the lesson about backups and documentation in this relatively painless way than something more drastic later in life.
And yes, sometimes it DOES hurt to ask.
There is no easy way to solve the issue. Taking backup pictures does not guarantee the homework solutions are written before the due date. A clever student can write the homework solutions after the due date then set the camera date to a date before the due date and take the picture of the solutions. The picture will have the date stamp before the due date.
If the homework only contributes a small percentage of the final grade then the OP should not worry too much.
hey guys - lesson learned, I will always save a backup of my work from now on - on google docs or something that will show the date of uploading.
Crazy turn of events, I just got an email saying I got a grade change for that assignment. When I went onto canvas, the grade had been changed from a 0 to a 2.5/3 with a comment saying “grade changed after finding hard copy”.
Sweet! Thank you all for the great advise and help, looks like the situation worked itself out - I was going to kindly ask the professor if he could consider averaging out the scores with out that assignment if this didn’t happen. I don’t think it would hurt to ask to the user that said it would - the worst that could happen is that he would say no.
A happy ending for once - that’s great! You were lucky, and learned a little lesson in the process. I would let sleeping dogs lie on the grade - you dodged a major bullet.
Yes I learned a huge lesson here and have since been backing up ALL of my work - in fact I wanted to share an update. I got iritis and glaucoma my first quarter at UCD the week before finals so I got an incomplete in each course. I just made up the final for the physics 9A course I took and I think the professor I had no longer works there. Luckily I had went back after this and set up everything and now I have all my work with the grades including the midterms ready to go just in case anything funny happens. Thanks for keeping me on track!