Getting an instructor to change a final grade

In My Humble Opinion
41

It wasn’t a correction done at the end of the semester, but I did get a chance to do an assignment I had missed that was worth 15% of the final grade. I had missed a class (Tuesday - for a migraine, which I have a documented history of) and during that class, the professor handed out an assignment for a 2-3 page paper on something, due the next week on Tuesday. The next day, I went to a classmate and got all his notes, and got caught up, but he didn’t mention to me that the assignment had been handed out. I don’t blame him, it just didn’t cross his mind, and frankly, I didn’t ask even though I anticipated that something would be coming up soon.

The next lecture (Thursday), the prof was at a conference so a TA taught the course. No mention of the assignment. No really the TA’s fault, and I figured the assignment had merely been pushed back a week since the prof knew he’d be gone (there was no website for this course that the assignment would be available on)

Next Tuesday rolls along, and the prof tells everyone to hand in their papers before he starts the lecture. I just sat there, dumbfounded. After class, I went to him and told him I’d missed the assignment, and he told me “sorry, nothing I can do”. I went home, angry at him and at myself, but truly believing that I deserved a second chance. It was really a simple oversight, a bizarre series of events that led to me never hearing about this assignment.

I emailed the prof that night, and gave a full out explanation, with sincere apologies for bothering him, but asking for the chance to hand in the paper. The next day, he emailed me back, along with the subject of the assignment, and told me to get it in by Monday, but that he was expecting 3-4 pages. I had some time off that week (due to labs in another class alternating weeks) and I was able to hand it in on Friday.

I got a crappy grade, IMHO, for the work that I did, but at least it wasn’t a 0%. It was a difficult class, and that 0% could have really caused me problems in the end. I thanked the prof anyways, and moved on.

42

Once my professor lost one of my papers, and gave me a C for a course when I should have gotten a B at the least. Then she stopped responding to my calls and emails asking about it. I even started a senioritis induced thread here asking whether or not I should bother jumping through hoops to get it changed. Long story short, I decided to bother, and the grade was changed.

43

I’m still curious what the syllabus said about the prof’s grading policy…

That would clarify a lot for me…

44

Quality and thoroughness of our assignments. Pretty subjective stuff.

45

What kind of assignments WERE these? Speeches? Writing assignments? Even in classes that were writing-heavy (which was most of my classes), there was an objective grading scale: grammar/spelling, organization of idea, quality of prose. This is stuff that was gone over on the very first day of class, on the syllabus. Why did no other students challenge the lack of a grading system?

46

Don’t go to law school.

At least at my school (and I think this is pretty typical), your entire grade in each class is based on one final exam or paper, and you have zero feedback on the quality of your performance before then.

47

In high school, I got a grade changed. Maybe it shouldn’t have been changed; maybe it shouldn’t have been bad in the first place.

It was a journalism class, and up to the final assignment, I was making a high A. I disliked the teacher, and I was stressed. Still, I started work on the final project, worth 10% of our grade: a piece of investigative journalism about our school.

My piece was on censorship. I felt (unjustifiably, in hindsight) that the librarians were stonewalling me when I asked them questions–and so, disgusted, I decided to blow off the project. Sure, I’d lose 10 points from my final grade, but that would still be a B in the class.

When I got my report card, she’d given me a C. So I went in and talked with her about it, showing her how I was calculating my grade and asking her how she’d calculated it to get a C instead of a B.

She was really frustrated with me, and told me that she wanted us to care about the subject, not just care about our grade. I stuck to my guns, saying that clear standards for how to achieve a certain grade inclined students to caring about their grade, and that I just wanted her to abide by the standards she’d given us at the beginning of the semester.

She didn’t like it, but she eventually consented to raising my grade to the B that her rubric said I’d earned.

I’m not especially proud of my behavior in that situation.

Daniel

48

Has any instructor changed a final grade for one of your students?
Sure. Where I teach, technically, the only legitimate reasons for changing a final course grade are: (1) instructor clerical error, and (2) change an INC to a grade based on completed work. (1) has never happened for me. (2) happens now and then. HOWEVER … to change a non-INC to another grade is super-rare for me, but has happened. Students have come to me to explain their special circumstances, and I have changed grades when a slight grade change (like half a grade) would allow a student to graduate or to keep financial aid. Sometimes I will ask for additional work, like a paper, to be done. Yeah, I can be a soft touch.

49

This is a bit of a tangent, but twice I had professors change my grade unasked.

The first time I got a note from a professor who taught a Human Heredity class I took 3 semesters earlier. He wanted to talk to me in his office. It sounded ominous and I went with a bit of trepidation (was I going to be accused of plagiarism or something?). My class was the first time he had taught the subject. He explained that he had taught the class twice since, and felt that he had graded my class too harshly. Since my final grade had been an 89, he had decided to change my grade from a B to an A.

My jaw dropped. Not just because he was changing my grade, but he, a world class geneticist (Crick had been a teacher of his), remembered me and my grade, and was proactively changing the grade because he thought he had been unfair. He’s on the top 5 list of my favorite people.

The second time was when I got an Incomplete because I had the flu during exam week. (Really! I swear!) Next semester, I was dreading taking the final. I would have to restudy for an exam when I already had a full course load. He saw me in the hall one day and said, “Ah, hell, forget about the exam. I know you know that ****.” I think giving me the exam was just too much hassle for him.

50

You think students actually read the syllabus? :wink:

From what we’ve seen, a lot of them don’t bother to look at the thing after the first day of class. They don’t know the policies, when things are due, what my email address or phone extension is, or anything. One of my colleagues was griping to me about this and ended by saying, “viva, why do I fucking bother [giving out a syllabus]?”
The answer, of course, is that we have to; it’s a CYA issue.

Back to the OP: I have changed a grade on occasion if it turns out that I made an error, but as others have stated here, I will not hand out As and Bs like candy to people who didn’t earn them and didn’t realize until the last minute that they were failing, despite all the feedback and info they got during the semester. Whining, begging and demanding are not good tactics.

51

I post my rubric and policies online: everything is on my webpage: content, tests, keys, policies, aliased student score ledger …

I even do a pre-final audit, so that my wee bastards know their final exam threshholds for F,D,C,B,A.

I don’t track attendance or assign busywork: my students aren’t 3rd graders, and my department doesn’t force me to treat them that way.

I consider borderline cases before I post the letter grades, and don’t change letter grades unless there is some sort of clerical error.

But since I do post-test score ledger audits after every test, and before the final examination, any and all errors are captured and corrected beforehand.

52

On an English Comp paper, the Prof gave me a B and circled a term I’d used in a comparitive sense. After class, I asked him to justify that mark, and he claimed no previous exposure to the term. We went to his office and his dictionary did not contain the term I’d used. I asked for a Bible, and after a bit of thumbing Matthew 13:24 was found. The Prof read the section and revised my paper to an A.

53

Okay, see, that’s a deserved grade-change!

Daniel

54

I can definitely sympathize with both of you. I can’t believe that DA actually did that. On the other hand, I was so disgusted with a teacher when she gave me/JRR Tolkien a B, it COULD have tempted me to ask the same question!!!
hh

55

When I was a TA, I was assigned as the primary instructor for two classes per semester. In both classes, I laid out a class plan that called for 5 tests. I dropped the lowest grade and averaged the remaining 4. I also gave out extra-credit problems that got you a point or two extra on your final grade.

Never had anyone complain about a grade in my class or ask me to change it. However, I did overhear a female student hit on one of the other TAs and offer to “trade for a grade”. When he turned her down and told her she would fail the course, she went straight to the Dean and spun a story of how he had hit on her, etc. The look on her face when she found out that I had overheard it all was priceless. Needless to say, she did not complete her matriculation at my alma mammie. :smiley:

56

Indeed-he was a very good Prof, and we enjoyed the class together, as I was one of two adult (late 20-something) students as opposed to the rest of the class which was fresh out of high school. :wink:

57

I tried to once in calc III. I ended up with a D+, but it was a long story. I got a C+ on exam 1 and a B on exam 2, and my homework average was an 89% with a quiz average of 77%. However I did terrible on the final and she flunked the bottom 25% of the class, which I fell under due to my poor grade on the final. I asked her about it and asked her why I got a D+ in the class when I had gotten Bs and high Cs on everything else. She rechecked her grade but said there’d been no mistake. I really didn’t know who to complain to after that as I felt I deserved better as the only way I could’ve gotten a D+ in the class would be if I had gotten a 42% on the final, which is impossible with the curve. I wish I’d known it was a weedout course when I signed up for it, I would’ve picked anotehr professor. Pickaprof my ass.

58

What was the term? There are obsolete usages that appear in Biblical contexts that I would consider inappropriate (i.e., “wrong”) in contemporary usage.

59

Diamonds02, you have not given us much information to work with, but it seems like either your instructor or you (or both?) lacked in his/her/their performance in this course.

From my hypothetical POV as an instructor, I read this…

And I wonder…

If your posts here are indicative of how you give a presentation, then I have to suspect: perhaps you are too vague with details? Or perhaps you had the same disregard for English grammar during presentations and class discussions? I would be marking off points if I were a professor grading ANY formal college paper or presentation with the grammar displayed above. During informal class discussions though, I would likely correct such grammar but never take off point.

‘Done’ is the past participle of the verb ‘do.’

‘Did’ is the regular past tense of ‘do.’

It would be more proper grammatically to say: “We didn’t get any feedback on how we did on those assignments.”

I would not endorse this choice of syntax and the use of a contraction in a formal paper but would certainly find them acceptable on a message board. However, the blatant misuse of a verb sticks out like a sore thumb to me even in a casual context.

I echo the advice of other posters to go talk to the professor and ask questions about grade calculations.

From my hypothetical POV as you the student saying this…

I think to myself from that POV…

There should be evidence of the work you did in this course [even if you did not physically turn in papers or exams] whether it is in the form of a videotaped presentations, profs notes during presentations, or you own PowerPoint slides used in a presentation, etc. Such evidence would be important in a legitimate grade dispute.

In my own college education, evidence of my work and evidence of the material taught by profs were required for accreditation of my engineering degree program reviewed by ABET every 6 years. I have never had any grade disputes with profs after a course was finished, but on several occasions I did point out errors in the grading of my exams which were then corrected. Usually the difference was only a couple points.

I do not know what your instructor was obligated to do for this course, but you may want to speak to the dean of the college, director of undergraduate curriculum, or whoever is in charge. Some larger universities have a full-time academic ombud on staff to resolve student/professor disputes over grades and/or assgnments.

60

Just yesterday, I got the “Please, I really need an A in this class” from one of my HS chem students.

All year my mantra has been “Fix the problem”, because kids let the problem fester and just complain about it later and expect the adults to dig them out the holes they’ve created. So I know that she knows my feeling on leaving this for so long, and not bothering to retake tests along the way.

She never made a firm appointment to show up, she didn’t show up today during the finals schedule, she didn’t show in the first 10 minutes after class, and she was a real ass to me during the year.

I didn’t wait around for her. And I can use any sort of rounding up I see fit. So there.