The ongoing saga of Professor Moon Unit and the Mysterious Grade of Mystery has taken a dramatic turn into whatthefuckville and seems to be nearing its dramatic conclusion.
To recap: Professor Moon Unit is my brilliant, friendly, but stupendously scatterbrained Calc III professor. Our grades in Professor Moon Unit’s class are derived as follows:
-40% Exams
-40% Final Exam
-20% HW/Quizzes
At least, that’s according to the syllabus. In order to understand exactly WHY I’m on the verge of a mental breakdown, we need to examine each of these categories more closely.
Exams:
We’ve had two. I took Exam 1 in class and all was good - it was returned two weeks later, just like everyone else’s, clearly graded. I scored a 138/150 - no problems there. Exam 2 was a bit more… odd. I had to miss the exam date thanks to emergency dental work, having a molar pulled after I shattered it on a chicken nugget (don’t ask). I sent him about five emails over the next couple days to try to arrange a makeup; I never heard anything back, so I assumed I would be taking the exam during the next class, and I planned accordingly. Well, due to a power outage, classes were cancelled that day. More emails were sent, still no responses were recieved, so I figured I’d be taking the exam next time we had class (again). Next class rolls around and I show up ready to take the exam, but no! Moon Unit wants me to talk to him after class to schedule a makeup. OK, that’s fine… Then the professor starts passing out everyone else’s graded exam, and then starts to GO OVER THE EXAM even though I just talked to him five minutes ago about making it up. facepalm I excused myself from the class so I wouldn’t see the answers. After class was over, I arranged to take the exam during the next class.
Fast foreward - I took the exam and handed it in on the scheduled date. All is well. I’m expecting in back any day. But no! Three or four WEEKS later, I still haven’t recieved my grade, even though I ask him at the end of every class and he keeps saying he’ll have it next class. Finally, last Thursday, I was up in his office to inquire about my grades and my standing in the class, and to get that exam back. Moon Unit rifles through his papers… And finds my exam. Still ungraded. He hastily grades it, and I scored a 67/70. That’s cool, if a little worrying. More on this meeting later…
Homework/Quizzes:
Hoo boy. Homework and quizzes - 20% of our semester grade. Seems reasonable on the surface, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut… Things got messy. We’ve only had two homeworks and two quizzes. Let’s look at these seperately.
Homework: Two assignments, both early in the year. The first one was on Chapter 11; no announcement was made about whether it would be collected, then one day, at the end of lecture, someone asks about the assignment and he decides to collect it. 3/4 of the class had already left, so they didn’t hand in the homework, and now essentially the whole class is clueless, not knowing whether it will be counted or even what the assignment was. It’s a mess. The second HW assignment was a little better but not much. Because of a miscommunication, the grader thought the assignment was supposed to include some exercises that it was not really supposed to; some people had done those exercises for practice, but everyone who didn’t got docked points and had a not added to submit the problems later. This is problematic since the assignment, along with the other HW and both our quizzes, were only passed back this Tuesday… And as if that wasn’t enough, there are grading errors on my second HW (I was one of the majority of the class who didn’t even know about the first). Tho mistakes were made by the grader - he marked a problem incorrect when it wasn’t, and additionally, he added up my points wrong; net result, I scored a 52/70 when I shoulda had a 62/70. So in essence, homework in this class has been an absolute mess.
Quizzes: We had two of them. I went all pilot-to-bombardier on the first, scoring a 7/25, because I had missed the last two lectures and didn’t know about the quiz until half an hour in advance. The second quiz, I scored a 20/25, which is fine. Both quizzes were returned last Tuesday, so I had no chance to ask the professor if there was anything I could do to make up for the one I bombed. This becomes important shortly.
Final: OK, now it gets interesting. The final exam! 40% of our final grade in Calc III! Arguably the hardest and most important assignment of my life. Now, remember up-post when I said I was in the professor’s office asking about grades, and there’d be more on the meeting later? Well, it’s later. Back in the meeting, Moon unit drops two bombshells on myself and the five or so other people who were also there to ask about grades (see above regarding grade confusion; I was not alone in my cluelessness, and more people showed up over the course of office hours): If you have an A in the class, you’re exempt from the final! And if you get an A on the final, you automatically get an A for the semester! Holyshitawesome, I have great exam grades, I may not have to take the final! Actually, I shouldn’t have to take the final! SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!!!
Not so fast. That quiz I bombed? Because there’s only two quizzes and quizzes/HW are worth 20% of our grade, according to my calculations, I don’t have an A in the class in spite of having among the best exam scores in the whole class. SHIT! i should talk to the teacher! See, he said he’d exclude any “outlier” grades when calculating averages, i.e. any grade that is clearly a fluke and not representative of your work ethic/ability. This quiz definitely qualifies! Well, alrighty then. Moon Unit tells me he’ll calculate my grade that night (we’re still in that meeting, btw; it’s Tuesday) and confirm that I’m excused from the exam. Well… He never emails me. The next day (yesterday) I email him with a detailed list of all my questions and concerns and a request to confirm/deny whether I’ll be taking the final. The next day (Today, day of the final) I still have no response. Shitshitshitshitshit! What am I gonna do!?! I dunno what the hell is going on with grades and depending on what’s going on with grades I may or may not have to take this massive, very difficult, grade-defining exam! Well, I’ll go to his office hours and get this cleared up. No biggie!
Wait, you didn’t ACTUALLY think anything would go according to plan, did you? Hah! As if! Moon Unit fails to materialize, although about 20 other students from the class do, all looking to have grading questions resolved. Panic begins to rise as 6:00 and the start of the final approaches with no sign of the professor. Do I have to take the final or not? What’s my grade so far? Will that quiz I bombed be dropped or not? What about that homework that 3/4 of the class didn’t know about? Can I get my grade on that other homework corrected - the one where the grader goofed up and cost me almost a letter grade and a half (which is really important since so few homeworks and quizzes are going to constitute a fifth of our final grade for the class)? Will the grade weights that were posted on the syllabus be adjusted to reflect the lack of homeworks and quizzes? And oh yeah, do we have to take the final or not? These are the questions which I and the assembled crew of professor-seeking students are asking ourselves and each other as Judgement Hour draws nigh.
Well, no answers are forthcoming. The teacher never shows - he has car trouble! Our final is proctored by my Calc II professor from last semester. I love her, she’s great, but she can’t answer any of my questions - or excuse me from the exam. Ditto all the other students in the same boat as myself. So I get to take the exam, whether or not I had an A in the class after all (a fact which remains unresolved as of this post). It was brutal, a whole semester’s worth of vector and multivariable calculus, fifteen questions, some of them impossible to solve (unless you can solve cos(x) = x[sup]2[/sup] without a calculator; don’t bother. You can’t.). I took the whole two hours working that exam, and by the time I finished it was too late to even get dinner, everything was closed.
Fortunately the Calc II professor who proctored the exam knows me and likes me, and has offered to go to bat on my behalf if I have to go to the dean to fight the Good Fight against Moon Unit’s utter grading incompetence. This may or may not have had anything to do with all the other students who had similar problems, but whatever; I, and 1/3 to 1/2 of the class, have serious issues and concerns about Moon Unit’s grading, and we feel we’ve been cheated in more than a few ways. I for one am going to fight tooth and nail to get the A I should have had if Moon Unit would have just calculated my grade and emailed me like he said he would. Communication in this class has been, by and large, abysmal; it’s basically one giant clusterfuck where nobody, including the professor, knows what’s going on at any given time. I’ve already fired off another email to the professor which amounts to, in essence, “What the heck is going on? What are you doing with grades, and can you please go ahead and officially confirm that I’m excused from the final that I just took earlier tonight?” Depending on what, if any, answer I get (and given that he has NEVER replied to any of my emails and other students report that my results are typical, I’m leaning towards “no response”) this may be about to get very ugly; I’m crossing my fingers in hopes it doesn’t.
Ugh… This is all such a pain in the ass.
Oh, and the final exam kicked my tail six ways to Sunday.
It’ll be my job to explain why some data isn’t available for a briefing tomorrow. I needed to get the data to someone else for some slides, but since I couldn’t get it done, I don’t think she should bear the brunt of the questioning on it why it wasn’t done.