Bite Me, Professor

The BBQ Pit
21

The old Computer Learning Centers used to do that too. I went in once to check them out and take their aptitude test (which everyone passes, of course). This was around 1980. Granted, back then the IT world was, maybe, a little less casual than today, but I found the idea of a dress code in a school for adults ludicrous. Same for kids’ schools too, but that’s a different debate.

The last thing I noticed on the way out was a huge floor to ceiling mirrow near the exit. In golden letters at the top were emblazoned: “Would You Hire This Person?”. I nearly gagged right there.

Years later the school went under, or got into some kind of regulatory trouble. Quite a stellar performance in the business world; obviously their sartorial advice should be followed without question.

22

And if black rabbit doesn’t absorb the lesson behind that, black rabbit will always be the guy in the polo shirt giving presentations, and never the guy in a suit listening to them.

23

Well, I said they don’t have to wear anything nice. :stuck_out_tongue: Even a requirement for formal business attire allows room for personalization and style. But I know what you mean.

24

Neither will be the guy in the polo shirt who owns the company.

25

Lots of stuff is still spiral bound, for some it’s even preferred. If you go to Kinko’s your choice is pretty much that or GBC comb, which is worse. Of course there is a lot better, but Kinko’s doesn’t offer it.

26

Oh, you poor thing. You had to work part time? Goodness. How did you survive?

Actually, when on the programming track you have the choice of learning either C# or C#, and on the networking track you can learn either Active Directory or Active Directory, and the database administration consist of DBAI: Access, and DBAII: Advanced Access, then yes, it’s a fucking trade school. A four year, ridiculously expensive trade school.

Are you serious? Here, let me help:

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=both

Because IT is (or should be) all about standardization. If you do it one way, every time, you can find a way to automate it. You can quit dicking around with things like header sizes and worrying about whether you put a period or a comma after the source title in your bibliography and actually concentrate on the content. In the business world I work in, the single, most overriding directive for data architecture is to separate the presentation from the content. Inextricably binding shit together for no good reason leads to complexity, duplication of effort, ineffciency, and inflexibility.

So pardon the fuck out of me for hoping that an IT professor with pretensions of business savvy would prefer we spend most, if not all, on the actually content of our assignments, instead of sending out a rubric where fully 30% of the final grade is based on our adherence to his own personal citation form.

27

Oh, blow it out your ass.

I never thought I’d see a good argument for teaching to the test. Please tell me they don’t actually allow you to shape any impressionable young minds.

28

Update: I’ve just lost any shred of doubt I had regarding this guy’s jackassery.

Assignments A-D were each 10% of the final grade, per the syllabus. I got 100% on all four.

Assignment E was 30%. I got a 97%.

Assignment F was also 30%. I got an “A-”. No numeric score - just the letter grade. By my school’s grading scale, an A- is 90-93%. I’ll be very uncharitable to myself, and call it 90%.

By that measure, my final grade should be a 96%. Which is a solid A, right?

Wrong. He gave me an A- for the term.

Now, I don’t want to look like a grade grubber - this dropped me from a 3.997 to a 3.993 - but still, this guy’s enough of an asshat that I felt like asking a pointed question. So yesterday, I sent him an email saying, essentially, “By my calculations, I should at least have a 96% for the term. Why did you give me an A-?”

His response?

“If you had received an A- on assignments A-D and A’s on E and F, I would have given you the A for the quarter. But since you got an A- on assigment F, you got an A- for the quarter instead.”

WTF? Do I need to draw this dumbass a pie chart or something?

Get out your calculator, wiener, and tap this in: 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 29.1 + 27 =

Write the result down on a piece of bond paper, attach a wire binding, crumple it up in a ball, and shove it up your pisshole.

Everybody now:

DOOOOOOSHBAAAAAG.

I’m going to drop it, because frankly, I want to have as little to do with that hoser as possible from now on. My actual advisor told me it was the best paper-cum-presentation of the year, so the other guy can go fuck himself.

29

I wasn’t that sympathetic to most of the OP, but as the story has gone on, I have come to agree with you about his assholiness. I have to tell you, though, that your scenario is frighteningly common. Many of my professorial colleagues do not understand fractions and decimals, nor how to add, subtract, and multiply. They make things worse for themselves by dropping assignments or adding extra credit without any clear plan, or, as in your case, assigning letter grades without a numerical backup. It sounds like this guy just didn’t like you and wanted to punish you by giving you a lower grade. I agree that it’s not worth pursuing formally, but could you have an informal chat with the department chair? “Look, I’m not complaining about my grade. I am satisfied with my A-. What I am concerned about is that the grade does not reflect the instructor’s own stated grading system in the syllabus, and he could not explain his rationale for assigning it.”

30

I suggest you actually send hiom a piechart.

31

The grading thing is the really obnoxious thing here- everything else could be put down to being quirky/pretentious/dumb, but if you give the students a grading rubric in the syllabus and then ignore it, you’re asking for trouble. Or maybe you could introduce your IT professor to the magic of a little program called Excel- in his line of work, it might be useful.

32

Yeah, I wouldn’t just let that grade bullshit stand on principle. While it might not matter in the grand scheme of things to you, it might matter a great deal to the next person who gets screwed by this douche bag.

33

I’m secretly holding out hope that the prof is actually a genius and that all his douchebaggery and busywork is designed to elicit a rant exactly like this one, which earns you an automatic A. Unfortunately, he probably doesn’t actually understand what you’ve written here.

Yeah, that’s the teacher’s prerogative, all right, but nobody has to respect him for it. This is no more an IT education than learning that CTRL-B makes text bold or learning how to ride the bus to your IT job. And making the tie a requirement is like teaching you how to ride the bus to your IT job, but actually getting the details all wrong.

I’d probably be inclined to write to the department head and bring the thing to his/her attention. Your dissatisfaction with what was being taught as “IT education” combined with the guy not bothering to follow (or maybe comprehend) his own grading scale seems like something the department would want to know about. Maybe even say, “I don’t expect you to change my grade, and it’s such a small discrepancy I’m not particularly worked up over it, but this doesn’t seem right.”

My own personal anecdote is that when I was in school, we had to write programs to play Mastermind against one another. My code absolutely dominated, beating the second place entry by a large margin, and the 3rd place one by miles. I got a B because I didn’t write my “keywords” in all caps. The prof claimed that arbitrary and cosmetic programming standards like this are the way it is in “the real world”. Long story short, 15 years of professional programming experience tells me he was full of it. In every job I’ve ever held, the proper response to “did you capitalize your keywords” is, “No. Do you want me to go do that or something that contributes to revenue generation?”

34

Perhaps what he’s saying (not very clearly) is that if he had seen a trend of improvement he would have given you the better grade. But since he saw your work steadily getting worse, he gave you the lower grade.

Not that I agree with this practice.
I once commented to such a teacher: “so, the more of your teaching I’m exposed to, the less I learn?” (Such a comment will NOT get your grade raised. But it may make you feel better.)

I especially don’t agree when he specified the grading formula in the syllabus, and now seems to not be following it. Or just incompetent at the math needed to follow it correctly.

35

While we wait for Lizard to try and troll us again, the grade thing brings up something that’s kind of a philosophical issue: Should cumulative grades be mathematical (and, thus, objective) or instructor-given (and, thus, subjective)? Obviously, the specific grade on a given project is a mix of the two, but once the number has been assigned should it just be entered into a spreadsheet with no further human interaction or should the instructor be able to do things like what black rabbit’s professor did? Part of this is whether you think students should be able to predict how well they’re doing in class (beyond ‘good’ or ‘bad’).

36

Part of this is also “what does the syllabus say about grading?”
If the prof says that 5% of the grade is on “trends” or that they reserve the right to raise or lower grades based on performance during the course of the semester/quarter - then, that’s their choice.

But when there’s a mathematical formula given, students should expect to be graded by that formula.

37

Um, no? And not just no, but hell no? There is an extent to which grading is subjective, of course, but part of a professor’s job is to grade consistently and not arbitrarily. If he or she cannot back up the methods for assigning both individual and final grades, he or she is failing at a basic part of the job (though one, I might add, where we get little to no training).

If, in Black Rabbit’s situation, if his final average were borderline, and the final grade in the series was the lowest, I might keep the A-, whereas if the final grade were an A I might bump him up based on his improvement over the term. But I never bump anyone down, and having a solid basis for each and every grade settles arguments quite quickly and definitively (unless the student is the provost’s niece, in which case her uncle intervene to prevent little niecey from having to deal with the consequences of her actions, but that’s another rant for another day).

38

The grading rubric published in the syllabus is what stands in most complaints.

39

Well, i think students should have a good sense of how they’re doing, so i do my very best to make sure that students can accurately predict their MINIMUM grade based on the grades they receive for each assignment, and the overall grading percentages announced in the syllabus.

I tell the students that the exact grade resulting from all their combined assignments is the minimum grade that they will receive, and that no-one’s grade will be reduced from the grade achieved by numerical calculations.

So, if a B is 3.0 and a B+ is 3.3, and the student’s various assignments and tests average out to a grade of 3.17, the student will always receive a B+, never a B.

To prevent this system leading to excessive grade inflation, i tend to grade reasonably hard when grading each individual assignment. That way, bumping the grade a bit during the final calculation doesn’t result in students getting grades that are higher than they deserve.

40

Or an actual pie. That’s 93% chocolate mousse, and 7%… well, something else that’s brown…

I’d make a bigger stink, but frankly, I’m through wasting my time on that place. I’m busy enough getting my shit together for grad school, and after three solid years of putting up with the general bullshit that comes with being a night student, I really don’t feel like taking off yet another afternoon from work for yet another meeting with a dean or professor that they may or may not show up for.