<p>So basically, I turned in my final paper for a class 7 weeks ago, and the professor never sent us comments back or anything. She sent us an email about five weeks ago to tell us that she was still grading. Anyway, I check my grade today, and I've received a B+. I was a bit surprised because I thought the final which was 25 percent would give me an A- at the very least. We didn't really have any other solidified grades. We had presentations worth 33 percent, but she didn't give us a grade for them. Anyway, I went into my outbox to reread the paper, and it turns out the file is corrupt meaning she didn't even read my paper. What should I do? I'm quite shocked. I go to a top 10 school that touts professor quality and extensive comments. Yet, the professor didn't even read my paper and it might have made a difference.</p>
<p>Um… contact the professor? Maybe she thinks you never sent it? Or maybe the file was not corrupted when it went out (if thats possible). Tell her you noticed the file was corrupted and was she able to download it? Worse comes to worse, a B+ is a perfectly fine grade.</p>
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<p>You need to be polite and contrite. She’s under no obligation. It’s your responsibility to send a clean file. </p>
<p>Use your charm and I suspect she will read it and act accordingly.</p>
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Students don’t necessarily know if there is something wrong with the file transfer. As an instructor, I let them know if I have something I can’t open rather than just punishing them without an explanation.</p>
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<p>Are you are probably one of the great ones. </p>
<p>You must know that not everybody is as reasonable as you, and going in with attitude may backfire for this student.</p>
<p>I don’t think I understand the situation. You’re saying that the file was unreadable, and you still got a B+? How is that not equivalent to turning in no paper at all, or gibberish?</p>
<p>You are blaming the OP? Obviously the professor didn’t bother to try to open or read the paper, and just gave a grade that might seem credible to almost anyone (a C student will be pleased but not complain, and an A student will usually just accept it).</p>
<p>I am not blaming the OP. </p>
<p>I am suggesting a strategy of sweetness in case the obviously lazy professor is also defensive about it.</p>
<p>I second being sweet about it. Just send her an email along the lines of “I was double-checking everything and I see that my paper’s file is corrupt. Is that just on my end, or did you have problems, too? I’m sorry that I didn’t check until now, but I’d just like to make sure you received it.” and if you want, maybe even add something about how you’d liked to see the grade you EARNED and see how you can improve with your writing. </p>
<p>One of my friends actually forgot to submit his final paper and is contacting his professor about it. He’s a really chill prof and chair of the Department, but he’s under no “obligation” to read it, grade it, and fix the student’s grade. He can if he wants to, and being nice about it helps lean them towards being nice themselves. </p>
<p>And like I told my friend, go ahead and ask. At this point, you’ve got nothing to lose!</p>
<p>No, I’m not blaming the OP. There is no reason to neurotically check the readability of files that one has submitted.</p>
<p>But if the paper was unreadable, and the student got a B+, then the rumors of grade inflation at the “top ten” school are probably justified.</p>
<p>Don’t you think a decent human being would have sent back an email saying - when I tried to read / grade your paper the file was corrupted; can you please re-send within X time frame? For a professor to open a file, see it was corrupted, and therefore just assume the student didn’t send and mark him down accordingly is ridiculous behavior.</p>
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<p>Both good possibilities. </p>
<p>Sometimes sent emails never reach their recipients due to glitches in the email servers being used to sent/receive the message at various points on the way. </p>
<p>Attached files could also be corrupted during transit as well for that reason, however rare it may be.</p>
<p>What format? .docx? .doc? .pdf? .odt? A tarball of LaTeX files?</p>
<p>A no-paper situation would surely, hopefully, result in less than a B+, even at the tippy toppest grade inflator.</p>
<p>You need to contact the professor, and quickly, if you have questions about your grade. Do it under the guise of gaining clarity, learning, and improvement. If you aren’t happy with the response then you’ll have to escalate according to school policy. </p>
<p>Good luck!!</p>
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<p>If it is possible to check, then one should.</p>
<p>One of my responsibilities at work is putting files on the company’s download area, before publishing the download link to customers, I have to ask a person from outside the company’s network to test downloading & installing the file.</p>
<p>It’s a good habit to have, at school and at work.</p>
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<p>Agreed regarding checking the outbox. However, that assumes the file in the outbox was corrupted from the very moment of its creation when it was sent out. </p>
<p>This may not necessarily be the case as files can be corrupted over time on a given hard drive depending on the conditions the machine/that particular area of the hard drive was subjected to. </p>
<p>Also, if a professor is as unresponsive after an extended period as OP has indicated, how is this test to occur?</p>
<p>Downloads from websites are much more direct from server to downloading end user whereas email could be bounced around several different servers before reaching its destination. </p>
<p>If a given email is Cced, there is the possibility, however remote, of some recipients receiving good files while others receiving corrupted ones depending on which intermediate servers/problematic connections each of those emails bounced through en route to their respective recipients.</p>
<p>there is no evidence the professor did not grade the paper. OP expected an A-, got a B+. really? Let’s not jump to conclusions here.
My 15 years of teaching tells me students are too optimistic about their grade expectations, significantly so. Our student teacher evaluations, which are sent out at the end of the course with only the final pending, asks "what grade do you expect to receive ". What a shocker compared to the actual grade distribution!</p>
<p>Sure, I agree that the professor should have told the student that the file was unreadable, if it was–though perhaps the problem with the file occurred later on, and the professor could read the paper.</p>
<p>The part of your post that I don’t get, Pizzagirl, is the part where you refer to “mark[ing] him down accordingly.” If the professor had really marked him down <em>accordingly</em> to having no term paper, then the term paper component of the grade would surely have been a 0, and it’s hard to come up with a B+ out of the rest of the course, given that the OP indicated just a final and an oral presentation with no feedback.</p>
<p>I am not at all defending the professor in this situation. I can’t tell what the prof was doing–possibly nothing.</p>
<p>What I would recommend is that instead of approaching the professor with a note asking for suggestions to improve, etc., the student should simply say that he noticed that the file had become corrupted at some point, and then ask if the prof received a readable file. If not, he could offer to supply the original paper.</p>
<p>( . . . although I have to say that if I received an unreadable file from someone, and they provided me with this scenario, I would need to have developed a good opinion of the person over the course of the semester to believe the story–otherwise, I might suspect that it was a scam to gain extra time for the paper.)</p>
<p>I find it hard to believe the prof didn’t get the paper. Like QuantMech I’d assume that the prof would have given a zero for no paper and that the final grade would surely have been lower than a B+. I think the paper wasn’t corrupted and got a grade less than an A- resulting in a B+ for the course. The idea that professors just make up grades for papers they are too lazy to read seems much more implausible.</p>