Students! Come rant! it's that time of year!

Since we have the Educators’ rant thread, I thought it was only fair that we students should have one as well.

Especially since I have a rant, but I can’t be the only one.

My program is online; we do everything over the Internet and turn in our work by email or electronic drop boxes.

Back in early April I had to turn in a short paper which was worth 16% of the grade. Note the date…early April. I still don’t know how I did on it, because this prof takes forever to get anything back to us, and I had just resigned to waiting to see what my final grade was.

Flash forward to last Friday, May 25. I normally check my school email at least once a day, so about 3:30 I log in. Turns out there was an URGENT message from the professor about this paper, and when I opened it, his message said that he was unable to open it because I had done it on my home computer which runs the Vista OS. His message was dated around 8:30am that day. So I answer that I"m sorry I didn’t see his message until now, and I couldn’t reformat the paper now because I was using my work computer, and the paper was on my home computer. I would reformat the thing as soon as I got home, which would be in about an hour. I get home, and get the reformatted paper to him at 4:49pm.

Next day, last Saturday, I check my email again, hoping to see an acknowledgement. There’s nothing. So I click on over to the course tool that shows our grades, and find that I’ve received a zero on the paper, and a C- in the class. The datestamp of the grade is 5:02pm Friday.

A C fucking minus. Enjoy your long weekend.

Needless to say a couple of further emails followed–from me of course. I still haven’t gotten a response from the prof. And if you’re going to give someone a C-, which is tantamount to failure in grad school, the least you can do is provide an explanation, holiday weekend or not. Especially as it turns out, Friday was the day that final grade reports were due, and yet you couldn’t be bothered to find out that you couldn’t read a student’s paper on that same fucking day, and this a paper that was turned in over six weeks previously.

I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad about the grade, because I know I did better than that. But it sure doesn’t help to have it on my transcript.

I definitely will be taking this to the academic appeals board if the professor won’t adjust the grade this week.

I’ve been having a similar problem. I just finished week four of a five week class and haven’t gotten any feedback since week one. True, the professor posted a few threads mentioning that there was some sort of server foul up so she’s had problems sending out the grade reports. No problem, says I. I post to the thread offering my personal email account and ask her to email it to me there. Never happens. I email her directly and ask her to reply to it with my feedback. No response. I call her at home and leave her a VM. No response.

I’m certain I’m going to pass, but I’d like confirmation of that. I’ve made every attempt to give her another way to get it to me, but I think she’s ignoring me. I can’t wait to fill out the survey on this class.

Who the fuck thought that holding oral exams late at night to be a fucking good idea? I got polled out late and had to face a disinterested, tired, worn teacher who’d just seen 23 presentations and probably just wanted me to fuck the hell off. Understandable, at 22:30.

Jebus. Someone’s gonna hang if I fail that exam.

Spectre-- He probably had to turn in SOMEthing since grades were due and departments get fined for late grades. People are horrible about getting things graded on time in grad school and will sometimes just submit temporary grades and change it later. Meanwhile he’s probably trapped in an archive in Denmark or some shit. Don’t panic.

Lets pit lecturers who assign group projects. My average is good, in around first class, or rather I should say it was until I got the results of this project. Project is worth 50% of two classes, it was a big deal, I got into a group with one person who didnt start until the day before it was due, and another guy who cant write in english. As you can imagine, project was a disaster! Passed it… but thats about it, in fact I would imagine the grade would equal a fail in a lot of US schools.

You should read this thread, which is a stunning anthem on behalf of all good students grouped with idiots.

I have a somewhat weak rant compared to Spectre’s (good luck Spectre), but it’s been driving me nuts this quarter anyways. Prof. does not have his shit together - he’s an unbelievably brilliant guy and was a stunning scholar even in undergrad, but man is he scattered. Every day I get on the freeway for an hour and a half, hit my first class, then have thismuch time to get in a pee break before I scurry over to his class.

A couple of weeks he says, “Get the handout I sent you this morning!” referring to the 20 page PDF he emailed (and that the student must print) to the class around the time I am on the freeway. Then he gets in a tizzy when I (or anyone else for that matter) has the damn handout. He was supposed to get a course reader made (so he says) but must have botched it since it’s Week 9 and no one has a course reader. What-ever. This repeats itself weekly or so.

We also don’t have our midterms back. He says they take 10 minutes to grade. There are 30 people in the class. Midterms were four weeks ago. I guess I shouldn’t complain too much, since the fact that the man doesn’t give a crap has translated to a halving of our final project workload - it went from a 10 page research paper to a five page essay with a handpicked bibliography. Snoozeville. I’m practically on summer vacation already.

That should of course be “don’t have”.

You submitted the paper in early April, and he never acknowledged it or told you he couldn’t open it until late May? That’s fucked up.

On the rare occasions that i ask students to submit work via email, i make a point of opening each attachment as soon as it arrives, just to confirm that there is no problem with the file, and that i can read it OK. If there’s a problem, i email the student back immediately to let them know; if there’s no problem, i email the student to confirm that i’ve received the paper. I also send an email to each student who hasn’t submitted a paper, so they can’t come back three weeks later and claim “But i sent the paper, and you never said anything.”

The vagaries of email, and of file compatibility, make this sort of communication essential, in my opinion.

IIRC he did acknowledge receipt shortly after I turned it in, but it was only Friday he discovered that he couldn’t read it.

On checking my calendar I overstated things just a bit; I turned it in mid-April, not early April, but still.

Dear Professor…

It is my senior year of college, yet I have never ranted about this before. You taught a basic English class, and you were not full-time faculty, and you were very rude to me. I know you are gone now, but this has recently come up in another class and it was handled nicely, and basically I want to rant about general things. You should not be allowed to assign students a paper - one specifically about a “controversial news topic” and tell me that because I have written a paper on the topic before I can not do it. That class was in high school, I wrote a 3 page paper on something that is rather controversial. I did not want to use anything from it except one of the sources, and I was pretty sure using a source more than once was legal. Thank you for giving me shit about how I should choose a different topic because of this, then explaining that I had to anyways because you refused to accept papers on that topic due to your “personal beliefs” on it. That is shit…

Dear Prof. #2,

I know you are trying to give us quizzes to keep us on track with our reading, but seriously. Yes, I read the story, but is the color of someone’s hair a relevant detail in it? Obviously, since there are 4 questions on your quiz and 2 are about that. I don’t mind anything else about your class, but the quizzes are a joke. You ask very specific questions in a survey class, where we cover 3-4 works a day, expecting us to know every detail but never discuss theme or form in the quiz. The last was about a Beckett play, Endgame, and your question was about the stage directions on the next to last page? I’m not sure that shows an understanding of anything other than that someone read the stage directions, and I cannot understand how those three words could show you if we read or not. It is just fucking stupid…

Thank You,
Brendon Small

A small thing, but one that has really shaken any confidence I had in this particular tutor. I’m in the last year of a part time degree and each year get a new tutor. The first assignment with a new tutor is always a bit difficult, since they all mark slightly differently, so it takes some time to work out their own ‘angle’ and write accordingly. I should also add that this particular institution has its own referencing rules, which aren’t quite Harvard standards, but a bizarre hybrid.

So, first assignment, my feedback goes as follows:

[me] blah bla blah (ibid)

[Dr. Soandso] what does this mean? Is this some sort of code? I don’t recognise this but you’ve used it a couple of times

Somebody gave this person a PhD and they don’t even RECOGNISE the term ibid?
I should clarify the issue is not that ibid is not an acceptable part of the referencing structure, it is commonly used in this institution’s own publications, including the course text for previous years. The issue is that this person, who is supposed to be assessing me, who will be partially responsible for determining my degree class, who I’m supposed to go to for help ferchristsake has never come across the term ibid and apparently doesn’t know how to look up an unfamiliar term.

Roll on October, and I’m done with this…

“Oh, I’m sorry. How do you abbreviate ibidem, Dr. Soandso?”

Yikes! The professors are ahead of us in rants. You’d think we’d be in the lead since there are so many more of us, but then the profs have so many more stories to tell.

Now that I’ve graduated and grades are in, here’s my horror story of the semester.

I signed up to take a broadcast performance class. Even though I’m not likely to go into broadcasting, I figured I might learn some useful voice techniques for public speaking and the like.

So the professor assigns us a group project. Fine. Except that it turned into an object lesson in how group projects should not be run.

[ul]
[li]Wait two weeks into the semester to introduce it, then give a short deadline to submit complete projects. Refuse to give clear guidance as to expectations. Express disappointment when projects are not completed to your satisfaction by the deadline.[/li][li]Assign a project related to a major initiative of the department and refuse to cooperate with any of the other stakeholders (including the graduate student [me] who is doing the same research for her professional research project) about sharing research. Expect the grad student to share her materials, but not expect the other students to share their materials with her.[/li][li]Refuse to give any information about the intended audience. Reveal on the last day of class that the intended audience consists of flighty 20-year-olds. Deduct points because audience got bored. Make graduate student realize that intended audience probably does not listen to NPR.[/li][/ul]

Suffice it to say, I’m glad the semester is over, and I got my A for the course.

Robin

The prof has now responded, and told me he would grade the paper ASAP and change the grade as warranted.

So, no worries.

Oh great, next thing you know somebody who’s cell phone rings at the movies will react quickly to turn it off and act sheepishly. Or someone will go to Best Buy and have their complaint handled appropriately. George Bush will take the blame for something and apologize. Or maybe somebody’s mother-in-law will sened an email saying, “I apologize for butting in. This is none of my business.”

I mean what is the world coming to?

64 pages of problems, another 15 additional pages of handout problems, and another 5 hour long additional computer problems. All for a 10-week course. So carefully has he selected the problems he assigned for homework we have gotten a few problems more than once. In other words, 70% of this homework is just a bunch of crap. Which I’d normally just not do, but in this case one missing homework assignment=F for the course.

So we’ve had an educators’ rant and now a students’ rant, where do I fit in (clerical/admin)

This is the time of year when relatives start dropping dead like flies and students suffer a surfeit of illnesses that didn’t affect their drinking during the semester but by god does it stop them sitting exams :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m a student also, but admin is pretty good with the Open University, so I can’t complain :slight_smile:

It’s old but…

Please make sure that every problem in the exam is doable. Double check, triple check, have another person look for typos. Have another person try to do the problems. It’s not the student’s fault is a typo renders the problem unsolvable for the tools at their disposal.

We already had a bad opinion of you, but when, after getting some 90 questions (from 80 students) about “problem 1” being correct as printed,
you didn’t even try to solve it
but called your husband
who then came over and took about 5 minutes to declare the problem unsolvable,
and then you went and changed the questions to “why is this problem unsolvable?”

The correct answer was “because the professor is a twit.”

I wish I never wasted my money in grad school, ok so its not a total waste but some of those classes and jokes for profs were a complete waste of time and money.

My capstone grad class, was with an adjunct who wasn’t invited back the next semester to teach. He provided no syllabus and every class we had an open floor chat that wandered all over the place. The courseload was light to non existent. Still it was not fun and it was a brutal end to a bloody degree. I boycotted the graduation ceremony, figured it would be a bad omen to attend when the president of the university is leaving his post to go work for a grocery store!? :dubious:

Im saving for my kids college education but I swear Im gonna push a 2yr degree instead of 4 and let them get jobs with employers who will pay the rest of their college ransom to the ivory tower denizens.