In my CompSci class this semester, I exchanged email with my professor quite a bit. Most of the emails were clarifications on project guidelines and were resolved easily.
However, there were two instances where I emailed her about points I felt should have received, and I was correct. The first was two points on an exam. The second was 5 points on a project (there were five projects).
My exam scores are 86 and 79 and my projects scores are 86, 74, 100, and 102. The last one was graded as a 97 by a TA but I pointed out where the TA made a mistake on something the professor had said. The last project was submitted yesterday (I expect a 100 on it) and my final exam is next week.
My point is, does this annoy you when students do this? Was I annoying my professor? I had a 97… did I really need that 102? She didn’t seem annoyed in her email reply, but tone is hard to get from text.
If they were legitimate errors in grading, there’s nothing wrong with pointing that out, regardless of whether it’s annoying or not. It’s totally different than if you’re trying to scam your way from a C to a B. What I always found annoying were fellow students who requested extra credit to scam undeserved grades, or tried to argue an indefensible point for the same reason. And that’s only what people were ballsy enough to say out loud in class. I imagine professors hear ALL KINDS of bullshit through email.
For what it’s worth, I was generally a straight A student in college, even in calculus… but intro to accounting in my junior year was absolutely my achilles heel. The prof was HORRID and I just couldn’t get it. I ended up missing a D (which would have brought down my average a bit, but I wouldn’t have had to retake it) by less than a percentage point, but I didn’t scream or yell or write nasty letters to my TA or prof. I took my F like a man.
Yes, I am annoyed when students, particularly high A students, negotiate for points. As a student (I’m both a student and a professor), I have asked about missed points, but I always phrase it as wanting to understand why it was wrong, not wanting the points. Usually, if the professor sees that it was an error in grading, they will offer the points. If they feel my answer is not 100% correct, I respect that.
I extend the same expectation to my students. Clarifying your understanding of a concept is good. I hope you do that. But shamelessly begging for a point, or even worse a fraction of a point :rolleyes:, annoys the crap out of me.
ETA: to clarify, if it’s apparent that they only care about the grade and not the concept, that’s when it annoys me. I know grades matter, but the information should matter more.
If you didn’t get points that you were clearly entitled to, due to a grading error or something like that, I’d definitely want you to bring it to my attention.
If it’s more of a judgment call, I’m still happy for you to make your case, as long as you aren’t demanding about it.
What I don’t really want to hear from students is why they need the points, or why they need to pass (or get a C in, or get an A in) the class. I don’t do need-based grading.
Did you email the TA or the instructor first? If it’s the TA’s mistake you should email the TA first. This time of year, yeah I could see an instructor being a little brusque about having to deal with these details.
FWIW I’m a TA. If I actually made a grading mistake then I want to know about it, and I’ll apologize to the student for my mistake. Even I disagree with the student, I’m still happy to explain why I took points off. But if they understand their mistake and just don’t like how many points I took off … yeah that annoys me. Everyone wants points back, I can’t just give it to the students who complain.
If it’s really a case of a question being marked wrong when it’s right or something else that is obviously right but that I marked wrong, I don’t mind a student pointing it out. So many students are cavalier about classwork; I like it when a student is on top of things and concerned about his or her grade and quality of work.
However, it is annoying when a student fights for points when they don’t deserve them. I spent too long today with a student who is going to fail my class for the second time because he doesn’t read and follow directions. If I ask you to write an essay that contains A, B, and C and you instead write, oh I don’t know, a list that contains E, R, and Q, you are going to get an F on that assignment, and all the pleading in the world isn’t going to change the fact that you didn’t read the directions before you did the assignment.
I didn’t say grades don’t matter. I said the information should matter more. Conveniently, one of those naturally leads to the other. I get irritated when students disregard that.
If it’s a mistake and you really do deserve the point, of course I want you to point it out. I put a lot of work into my classes and want them to be as fair as possible, even if I sometimes do make mistakes.
When it does bother me is when students who have shown absolutely no sign of caring about the class are suddenly wheedling for points at the end. If the amount of dedication you spend begging for points outweighs the amount of dedication you spent actually trying to earn points, I’m not going to be impressed and I’m going to ask you to stop wasting my time.
No, she knows I was thoroughly dedicated to the class. I never missed a lecture or a lab (we were allowed to miss three labs without a deduction in points), I took excellent notes, heavily participated in discussion, and formed student study groups outside of class. My dedication was never in question.
I guess I was more worried that me asking for 5 more points (albeit deserved) was petty since I already received a 97 on the project.
I taught high school science for 26 years. I always set the grading system so that the only points a halfway conscientious student should miss would be on test questions, and those were multiple choice. Any mistakes in test grading would be happily fixed. The last few years I taught, the administration wanted rubrics for every blessed thing. Rubrics are great when you want to have a way to objectively grade a subjective assignment, but physical science is about as objective as one can get. Besides, the state grades schools on how well the students do on multiple choice end-of-course tests.
I digress- yep, it was annoying when kids pestered for points, but they usually only did it at the end of the term by asking for “extra credit” to pass. The administration pretty much required us to give them a chance. I let them, but what they had to do was harder than what they would have had to do (study) in the first place. Usually only three or four students would do enough extra to save their grades, but it kept the front office happy.
Either I had such a high grade that losing the extra point wouldn’t hurt or I did so bad on the test that, well, losing one more point wouldn’t hurt. I’d rather have my integrity than a grade.
I did. Well, I went to guidance, not the teacher, though since it was months later. First semester of Alegebra II I got an F by a couple of points Fast forward to the next semester: not only did I pass the second semester, my grade for the first semester was listed as a passing grade too. I went to guidance to see if they could figure it out, and they insisted that the grade on my first report card of the year had to have been the mistake, not the current one. I don’t know which was the truth, but I did manage to squeak a barely passing grade for the entire year.
Frankly, I’ve always suspected that my teacher changed the first term grade to a passing one because I tried hard and she didn’t want to fail me. This was, after all, the teacher who started the class by saying “if you had a certain teacher for Algebra, and I know you know who I mean [we knew because their feud was legendary], you were not given the prior instuction you need to do well in this class. Please don’t feel bad if you don’t do well because it’s not your fault.” I did have the teacher she meant for both pre-algebra and algebra…he was recently arrested for confiscating kids’ expensive calculators and selling them on ebay. But I diregress.
As a student, I will notify an instructor if a test answer that was marked incorrect is correct in the book/notes. We had a go-round on our very first quiz over the very first question … I didn’t need the point, but the book and the notes specifically stated that ABC was step #1 in the process, not DEF. (“But DEF is what’s italicized in the book!” is the answer I got to that one. :rolleyes:)
We had TWO of those on the final that we just took! We used a web-based program called Quia that automatically grades your submission and then shows you what the correct answers are. Well, two of the “correct” answers on the test weren’t the same as what was in the book. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only person who noticed it.
If I’ve made a mistake, marking something incorrect that is actually correct, or added points incorrectly, I absolutely want to know that. That’s not grade grubbing.
What IS grade grubbing is when students try to convince me that their incorrect answers are actually correct if you look at the question/problem in THIS particular way and with THIS particular idiosyncratic interpretation of the wording, rather than the straight-forward and clear wording that I actually used. That annoys me, and it doubly annoys me when the student who is grubbing already received an A on the work, or for whom the additional points would not matter in terms of changing the grade (i.e., the additional points would bring a low B up to a mid-B, since we don’t use a +/- grading system).
In those latter situations, the student almost always approaches me with a smug “I’m smarter than you are” attitude and indicates through their body language and tone that they are trying to find a way to trip me up so they can hold that smug attitude toward me for the rest of the semester. I rarely (although it does happen) have a student try to grub for points that approaches me with genuine puzzlement.
In college I wrote letters to instructors about grading. I always prefaced it with a disclaimer that I did not want my grade changed or points adjusted. I wanted them to know that their grading procedure was bullshit. Of course I phrased it differently. The case I remember distinctly was getting a zero on a question because I punched an expression into my calculator wrong. Right before the final answer I had the expression exactly right, but converting it to decimal I missed a +1 or something minor like that. No partial credit.
To me, no partial credit was the Prof waving a big flag shouting “I’m a lazy asshole. I’m not going to bother figuring out if you know the material or not, I’m just going to look at one number and decide credit in a binary fashion.”
I never needed the points anyway. So theres that. I suppose if I did need the points, my attitude would have been different.
Did you show your work (i.e. what went into the calculator)? I explicitly warn my students on tests, “You can use your calculator as much as you want, but if all you write down is a final answer, and that answer’s wrong, I can’t give you any partial credit.”
Also, while I am a believer in partial credit, in my experience the most difficult and time-consuming part of grading tests is deciding how much partial credit to award. Depending on how much grading he had to do, the prof you’re talking about may well have been an overworked asshole rather than a lazy asshole.
I get irritated when students disregard that.
Fast forward to the next semester: not only did I pass the second semester, my grade for the first semester was listed as a passing grade too. 
I went to guidance to see if they could figure it out, and they insisted that the grade on my first report card of the year had to have been the mistake, not the current one. I don’t know which was the truth, but I did manage to squeak a barely passing grade for the entire year.