A friend of mine is a professor at a southeastern college that will remain nameless, but there’s an interesting firestorm going on there. An English professor (not sure whether or not he’s tenured) lost his freshman class’s in-room final exams from summer quarter! He claims foul play- that they were stolen- but there’s no evidence of this.
I’m sure this can’t be the first time this has ever happened, but what exactly do you do when this happens? Nothing really seems fair-
1- Have the class re-convene after the quarter is over and re-take the exam (unfair for several reasons)
2- Give everybody a perfect score (also not fair- it means that the student who crammed their asses off get the same as the slackers who wrote down their name and “Flurpity flurp chicken butt” and walked out the door)
3- Just drop the final- not fair to students who were wanting to use it to pull up their grade.
Has anything like this ever happened at your school or workplace? And how would you handle this?
Hand out incompletes (unless they are graduating seniors, call them individually and offer them a choice)
Your grade can be based off the work handed in - if you had 92% of the possible points going into the final you have an A. Tell students where they stand in the letter.
If the student wants the chance to raise his grade he can either retake the test, or turn in a short paper about XXXX by X weeks into the next term - they will have an incomplete until then. This will not guarantee a better grade but the score on the paper/retest will be factored into the overall score for the course.
Drop them or give everybody a perfect score. I base that on two things.
If your grade sucks so bad you need to ace the final just to pass, you were jerking off all semester, and that’s just TS for you. You can pass an English course just by showing up, and if you can’t you’d better be a newcomer to the language or as an illiterate you have no business being in college.
What the slackers do has no bearing on your results. You’re not losing anything at someone else’s expense. After all, college is for learning, right? You’re supposed to put the time in to make yourself a well-rounded person :rolleyes: . All you’ve done is made yourself smarter than you would be had you been lazy, and that’s never a bad thing to hear the rah-rah college people tell it.
My high school burned down to the ground my senior year because of a gang initiation arson stunt. We very nearly lost our permanent records because they were held in two large filing cabinets with no backups anywhere. The volunteer firefighters risked their lives to save those minutes before the entire building collapsed (the fire was so bright that it woke up most of the town for miles around at 11:30 pm and many people like me got to witness it in person).
Still, most grade-books were destroyed midway through the year. They never announced what they planned to do about it but the teachers just made up grades for the entire year. We didn’t have real classes for the rest of the year anyway because we didn’t have any facilities but the gym and, although we got some very old donated textbooks, they didn’t match for the whole class. I got mostly A’s but an occasional B which sucked because we knew that the teachers were just making things up based on remembered performance and there wasn’t much we could do about it.
I’m a law student at a midwestern school that will, of course, remain nameless.
One of the professors lost all the finals one year, before I was a student. In a law school context, this is even more of a disaster than it might be elsewhere; law school exams are high-stakes affairs, with a student’s entire grade generally resting on that one exam.
So far as I know, her students were required to take the exam over again. She found the original exams later, I think, and those grades were used.
I mostly agree with Dangerosa, except I wouldn’t give out incompletes to any students. I’d give them the choice of either a) letting the grade stand based on the other completed coursework and not including the final, or b) letting them retake the final (or a make-up assignment).
Give the students the choice of taking their grade as it stands up to this point (quiz grades, homework, papers, whatever) OR taking an incomplete and taking the final sometime early in the following semester. The professor will need to make accommodations, possibly by providing different versions of the exams, to cope with any students who are unable to attend a scheduled exam time – I think it would be unfair to expect someone to miss another class in order to show up at the make-up exam. Actually, I would recommend changing the in-class exam format to a take-home or paper to avoid the scheduling issue. That would be more work for the professor, but absent any proof of foul play, I think this is reasonable to expect of the person who lost the exams.
Waenara, based on the info given, I’d think an incomplete would almost have to be an option because the summer term is over. Unless I’m missing something? Here there is a grace period to submit grades, so the term could have ended before the professor revealed the exams had been lost.
As a faculty member; if I lost the finals I would calculate the best possible grade the student could get based on getting 100% on the final and give them that grade. What’s the big deal? If a faculty member makes a mistake (and losing the finals is a biggie) you don’t take it out on the students. If they do slightly better than they would have based on their past scores what’s the big deal? Oh noes!! he/she should have gotten a c- and they got a c+, not earth shattering to this prof.
I knew someone who last year had a TA lose midterm exams. The prof of course had to tell the class that it was herself who lost them to cover the TA’s ass. It was all quite the drama-- I had a number of students that we shared come to my office hours pissed off and asking me what I thought a fair protocol should be, before I heard about it from the other prof. I can’t remember what happened in the end-- I think someone on campus found the TA’s backpack after a few days, crisis averted.
I’m thinking the option between using where the grade was before the exam or a makeup exam is very fair. There’s no way to make it all good-- it’s an assy situation that will never be ok, so it’s time for triage and damage control. Make each student think that they’re getting a better grade out of it than they would have otherwise-- make it open book or take-home or give them so extra prep time or materials if they choose to do the make-up exam. The good students especially will whine about how punitive it all is otherwise-- they need to feel like they’re not put into double-jeopardy without a choice.
Ah, ETA, anecdote number 2 (of no help, really. . .) the end of my first term as a TA I was at Nick’s English Hut in Bloomington grading papers while drinking because, well, that’s the only way to do it. I was supposed to get on a plane at noon the next day to head back west for the holidays, but wake up the next morning and realize that my gradebook’s missing–I must have left it at Nick’s! So I frantically pace until I get ahold of someone in the kitchen there at 10 AM or so: “OMG I left a gradebook there last night-- is it in the lost and found?” A few minutes go by and the fellow comes back,
“Well, which class is it for?”
“Huh?”
“There are several here. . .”
"Uh, humanites 201. . "
“Ok. . . which sections?”
A bad night for TAs at Nicks, I guess.
I had a TA lose my final once. I told her that I handed it to her (because you were supposed to hand your final to the TA so they could grade it, then hand them to the professor) and she checked my name off on the register which showed that I took the damn final. She told me tough luck, because I my final wasn’t anywhere to be found, I’d get a D in the class (the final was something like 40% of my grade). Wait, a D from an A before the final? I DON’T THINK SO!
I talked to the professor and told her what happened. She said she didn’t think it was fair to penalize me for my TA’s incompetence. The professor was being very helpful by looking around the office for my final and offering possible options should the final stay lost. Luckily, she found my final in some obscure place in the office and my A stayed.
Stupid TA. Throughout the whole ordeal, she maintained that I should have failed because my final wasn’t around for her to be graded. Somehow it didn’t make sense to her that I shouldn’t have to suffer for her incompetence. :mad:
If it’s your fault, you fix it! You don’t penalize the person for your stupidity!
This happened in one of my classes two years ago. My TA’s car was broken into in another city, and the hard copies as well as his laptop was stolen. So 1/3 of the class had no finals to grade. We were informed of what happened by email and (those who had been affected) given the option to 1) take your grade as if there never was a final (so if you were keeping a B in the other work, you got your B) or 2) email the professor that week (did I mention this was during spring break?). The prof would email you an essay prompt, and you had to send in a finish paper within 24 hours of his sending the prompt.
I took option 2, since I knew what I was getting otherwise and thought I could do better.
Or tell the TA that part of his/her job as a paid worker for the university is to take responsibility for the error. Help the TA communicate this to students professionally. The TA is considered a form of faculty member. They have responsibilities related to professionalism and integrity, not to mention student privacy.
Explore with the TA what led to him/her losing the exams and address if necessary (leaving them in an unlocked car or blacking out while drunk is pretty different from having one’s backback stolen from one’s office).
Include the situation and its resolution in the TA’s evaluation. Do no omit it from their file or from future letters, but if they act responsibly, emphasize this.
If i lost student exams, i’d do pretty much what Dangerosa suggested—give them the option of taking the grade they had accumulated before the exam, or taking the exam and having that counted in their final grade.
I should add, though, that i’m not a huge fan of sit-down exams. If i give exams at all, it’s usually a take-home exam, one in which the students are asked to apply the broad knowledge they’ve gained in the course, and are allowed to use their notes and readings. Some people believe that this isn’t a “real” exam, and that it doesn’t reward the students who’ve paid attention all semester, but i disagree. I make clear that i expect students to show a good understanding of the main themes of the course, and i find that the results of the exam usually reflect pretty much the sort of results i expect, based on the quality of student work and participation over the course of the semester.
One advantage of this (apart from the fact that i get to read typed papers, rather than crappy handwriting), is that if i ever do lose the exams (hasn’t happened yet), i can simply ask the students to email or submit another. I make it part of my class policy that students must keep copies (electronic, preferably) of all submitted material until the semester is over and the grades are in.
I would also give the option to retake, but I would also give the option of dropping the final score if it hurts their grade.
Happened once in a music class I had in school. It was a two part test. He had my score for one part but not the other and had already handed them back. He told me to retake the test and then we’d both look for the original and he’d give me the better of the two scores if it was eventually found.
Similar thing happened to my mom way back around 20 years ago. Her professor died and forgot exact details but the only option they had was to retake THE ENTIRE COURSE over again, and she decided not to. It’s a 3rd world country… what do you expect? She didn’t even get her money back.
