<p>Update: I asked for comments, and she replied saying she does not comment on final papers. She said my paper received a B…
I’m quite confused at this point…</p>
<p>It seemed highly unlikely that you could salvage a B+ if your paper was never read and thus received an F. Clearly your professor disagrees that you should have earned an A- in the course. I don’t think you should spend much time feeling confused. Very rarely do students get through college without at least a few disappointments. Your grade is still quite respectable. </p>
<p>I’d move on and keep up the good work. Each semester is a clean slate, which is a really good thing. :)</p>
<p>I just find it strange that she doesn’t even have anything to say about the paper. Not even one sentence. It’s very strange. I’m sort of veering toward the idea that she doesn’t have anything to say because it was never read. The file is/was corrupted. The thing is something similar seems to happen to me at least once a year. I’m a junior now. Last year, I had a very inconsistent TA in a class in which two exams comprised our entire grade. The TA said that I could escalate it to the professor and ask him to grade the exam but that he could possibly lower my grade. When I spoke to my adviser he said he was shocked the TA would say such a thing, and the professors do not lower grades. So I guess I was bullied out of pursuing it, and I vowed that I would never let that happen again. I want my transcript to be an accurate reflection of my efforts especially because I’m halfway through.</p>
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I’m confused as why you’re confused.</p>
<p>She said she did read your paper. I don’t think you should or can challenge that.</p>
<p>Your final paper got a B. You got a B+ for the course. That can be disappointing to you. But I don’t think you should or can challenge the grade given to the paper.</p>
<p>The only question is whether the file was corrupted when it got to the professor. Unless it’s the end of the world between an A- and a B+, I wouldn’t challenge that either.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure why this constituted “bullied.” The TA said that if the professor re-graded the exam, the grade could possibly be lower. Is that not true?</p>
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<p>Grades are not always a reflection of our efforts. How hard you worked does not always correlate to quality. And students are not always qualified to be the best judge of the quality of their work.</p>
<p>Perhaps effort was the wrong word. Performance might be better. And by no means am I delusional about my work. I think I’m pretty good at determining whether I have done well or not. If I’ve failed a test I know; if I’ve written a B.S. paper I know. I’m pretty honest with myself in that regard.</p>
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<p>This is the only part where I’d feel perplexed and internally, a bit annoyed. </p>
<p>IMO, if a student comes to a professor’s office hours asking for feedback on work where there was little/none, it is basic courtesy and part of the pedagogical duty for him/her to discuss it at some length. Especially if there wasn’t much previous work with grades and just as/more important, feedback. </p>
<p>Thankfully, I’ve never encountered this issue myself as even the grad Prof who only gave me a grade without any feedback* did take some time to go over my paper and give comments. While I would have preferred them in greater detail, it was much better than being told “I don’t comment on final papers”. </p>
<p>Especially if there was only one written assignment in the course. </p>
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<li>Felt very odd to receive a paper back with only an excellent grade, but absolutely no feedback considering every other Professor/instructor provided plenty of detailed feedback along with the grade in previous courses.</li>
</ul>
<p>OP. You are working mighty hard to rile yourself up. Put your efforts into what comes next. Of course, there are unfair situations and disappointments. But no matter what’s said, you keep coming back to how certain you are that you got rooked. You have to distinguish between a case where you may legitimately want to escalate within the dept versus are simply picking at a wound.</p>
<p>ps. Of course, when you ask for a 2nd read, you may end up with a lower grade, based on the prof finding the work lacking. Not that it’s retribution. You take that risk. Since when does escalating guarantee a “better review?”</p>
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<p>I’m surprised your adivsor would say that. Every class I’ve ever had that offered regrades explicitly said that they can either raise OR lower your grade (or keep it the same obviously).</p>
<p>Is this really that complicated? Send the professor an email and tell them you would like to meet to discuss the details of your grade in the course. </p>
<p>There is no harm in asking questions here but, ultimately, our opinions mean nothing.</p>
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<p>This may vary depending on individual college policies or those by each department/Professor. </p>
<p>The average prevailing attitude at my LAC was to never lower their grade during a grade dispute/regrade situations. However, there were always exceptions though I never had any during my undergrad career.</p>
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<p>Considering the professor has already indicated a policy of “Not commenting on final papers”, I’m not sure how productive such an email would be…especially considering the very possible negative reaction to what could easily be viewed as “grade grubbing”.</p>
<p>That’s interesting cobrat. I just browsed through a handful of publicly available CURRENT Oberlin syllabi and every one said that the professor could either raise or lower the grade. </p>
<p>Of course it varies by department and college. However, if there was no risk of lowering a grade, why wouldn’t every one dispute every grade?</p>
<p>I knew there was something off. So I sent her another email asking if she could briefly tell me where I went wrong or where improvements could be made because I am considering writing about the paper topic for my b.a. thesis. She said there is nothing to comment on since she couldn’t open the file. <em>Sigh</em> So basically she assigned me an arbitrary grade. Why couldn’t she have told me the file was unreadable?</p>
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<p>Oberlin may have changed since I left and there was acknowledgement that there were exceptions. </p>
<p>As I was speaking from my experience/observations, that much should have been clear.</p>
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<ol>
<li><p>Too much effort to bother. You’d be surprised at the laziness factor among many undergrads. Some younger undergrads I know are perfectly content with C/C- level grades, however puzzling that may be to us and most on CC. </p></li>
<li><p>Being intimidated by openly disagreeing/arguing with a Professor or older adult figure. Especially common among some first-year students and those socialized to be obedient/people pleasers to authority figures or others. Sometimes this extends to even classmates who “seem smarter/more knowledgeable” due to extensive class comments or worse, unkindly shooting down comments from other less confident classmates if there’s even a slight mistake/deviation as I’ve observed in a few undergrad classes my TA friend were TAing at an elite university. </p></li>
<li><p>Depending on campus culture, not desiring to be known as a “grade grubber” among faculty & classmates/peers due to possible negative social consequences. This was the case at my LAC when I attended as obsessing about grades or being extremely competitive about them wasn’t considered a good thing within its campus culture when I was there.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Wait, so she admitted that she didn’t read it? Then how in the world did you get a B on it?? </p>
<p>Is this common amongst top schools? At my regional university, this would NEVER happen. Our professors would tell us “hey, I couldn’t open your file, so you need to resend it or give me a hard copy.”</p>
<p>This does seem kind of fishy.</p>
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<p>If she’s admitted that in an email, save all email correspondence with the professor. </p>
<p>However, you do need to weigh the possible cost-benefit ratio carefully. </p>
<p>If this professor is in your major/minor department or in a department where you’ll be taking more core distribution requirement courses, putting this professor on the spot by initiating a grade dispute and bringing it to the attention of the department chair/dean along with having her read that paper and thus, creating more work for her that she may have tried to shirk may cause problems for you later in your academic career. </p>
<p>This is also a situation which must be approached with some tact to avoid making you seem like the “troublemaker” with this Prof and more importantly, her colleagues and administration. </p>
<p>It may not be fair, but this is one unfortunate reality students need to assess in grading disputes as academic departments are made up of human beings who aren’t always at their best in being unbiased or putting aside past grudges/grievances when it’s called for in a professional or other situations. </p>
<p>This is one situation where cultivating positive relationships with other faculty, especially departmental colleagues of this Professor concerned can be quite helpful.</p>
<p>Dispute is one thing. Asking for a chance to hand her the paper for a fair consideration-- well, that’s not contentious. In this case, is your advisor a different person? if so, Id say start there.</p>
<p>It’s not creating more work- she’s not duplicating something she already did.</p>
<p>And, some comments show how tricky it is to go on old info, anecdote or hearsay.</p>
<p>Another professor here, procrastinating for 15 minutes before going back to grade papers.</p>
<p>One reason why professors sometimes do not provide feedback on final papers is because they are under a time crunch. They don’t have 2 weeks to read at leisure and write thoughtful comments; they have to get their grades in to the registrar within 72 hours or whatever. Depending on the size of the class, I will sometimes tell students that I will provide a critique of the final draft of the final paper only if they request it in advance. It’s really no different than a final exam that the student will never see again. Like Amesie above, I design final papers in stages, with a proposal, a bibliography etc. so it’s not as if the student is working in the dark.</p>
<p>I post my grades on a Blackboard/e-campus platform so it’s not as if students don’t know how they are doing all semester long. I see no excuse for not doing so in this day and age. OP, you could ask the professor for a numerical breakdown of your overall grade if you are confused about how it was calculated.</p>
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<p>If all is fair, I agree. However, assuming what the OP has posted about the Professor in question is accurate, there’s already some troubling inconsistencies in the Professor’s conduct considering she first said the paper received a B implying she read it and then later, admitting in subsequent correspondence that she wasn’t able to open the attached paper in the email. </p>
<p>I don’t know about you, but if accurate, this is very troubling and unprofessional. </p>
<p>OP’s case is also similar to the case of Judge Susan Webber Wright who was a law student in Bill Clinton’s Admiralty law course at UArkansas School of Law as he offered her and other classmates B+ grades after losing their submitted exams. While not exactly the same, there are some interesting similarities. </p>
<p>[Susan</a> Webber Wright - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Webber_Wright]Susan”>Susan Webber Wright - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Luke
I’m seriously concerned about your attitude towards your professors. Considering the comments you made in a previous thread on how you wrote mean e-mails to those professors, it looks like you have a serious chip on your shoulder. While I understand you are upset about being dismissed from the program, I think you should reread all your posts and try to figure out where you might have gone wrong.</p>