Teachers: Do you get annoyed when your students nickel-and-dime you for points?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’ll admit, it annoys me when it is really trivial and the student seems only interested in the points, not in making sure they understand. But I do correct the grade, and I try not to let my annoyance show–I am mostly annoyed with myself for making a mistake.

One caveat: I teach high school, and so take LOTS of grades. For example, they have 1200 points from vocabulary assignments each six weeks that are collectively 10% of their grade. If I miscounted the number wrong on a quiz and gave you an 88 instead of a 91, it really, really isn’t going to affect anything, and I kinda expect a 17 year old to see that–and with 180 students, I AM going to make mistakes like that. But it is their prerogative, so I don’t pout.

22

College Professor: On a “meta level” I appreciate students who are engaged and motivated enough to actually communicate with me. If I made a mistake, I am happy to know it… If a student wants to talk about their exam, I tell them to come to my office. If/when they do, I usually take the exam from them, and ask them questions about the item in debate. If they know their stuff, I give them credit.

You might think that word gets out, and this happens often, but this is not the case. Perhaps only 1-2 students meet with me per semester, and rarely do they know the answer to the question they are complaining about.

23

Of course the process was shown. Kind of silly to complain about something with no proof.
And this is exactly what TA’s are for.

24

I tell students that they’re always welcome to come to my office with their exams if they have queries about points but to keep in mind, if I find any errors I missed, I’m just as likely to take off additional points as reward missed ones. :smiley:

25

Here is an interesting take on the partial credit issue for the hard sciences. I had several upper division chem and bio courses graded that way - and all my grad coursework: much less griping from students (though only a little less work for profs/TAs).

26

Not every professor/instructor/institution has TAs.

27

As a student, I always feel bad doing it and usually just let it slide because I don’t want to be thought of as a pest unless it’s really egregious. Two examples I can think of:

-9th grade English teacher mistakenly entered my report card grade as a B when the final grade sheet said A. Yeah, I complained about that one. She was mortified and fixed it.

-Idiot biology TA that took off 6 points on a 100-point lab report because I hadn’t included the Latin name for “garden tomato” in my graph captions. That was the only time I wasn’t diplomatic, because I was really upset. I went storming off to find the professor, pointed out what had been done, and told him, “This is completely absurd. I should not lose half a letter grade for this nonsense.” He gave me the points back. I TA’ed that class the following year and didn’t do any such thing to the students.

28

I don’t mind when mistakes get pointed out, but I feel violent impulses when the grade-grubbers corner me. You want to get an A in the class? Show up at least half the time and turn in the goddamned assignments when they’re due. That’s all. That’s it. That is literally all I ask of them. Show up and do the work. I’d say more, but i’m experiencing more violent impulses just thinking about it…

29

If a question was really mis-marked, I want the student to call it to my attention and was happy to change it. But that was virtually never the case. It was always, “I know I did it wrong and got the wrong answer, but you gave me only 3 points out of 10 and I think I deserved 5.” Sometimes I thought maybe I should’ve given 0. You did it wrong and got the wrong answer. And yes, it pissed me off no end.

Free advice: Don’t go to a review session and try to grill the instructor about what’s going to be covered on the exam. Any time a student asked if a certain subject was going to be tested, I said “Yes”, not the answer he wanted.

30

Related side story from a former annoying student:

My high school chemistry teacher had a great system for homework. It was AP chem II, and widely considered the hardest course in the school. It was optional, and only the truly devoted (or the children of truly devoted parents) would take it. Your grade was based on three things: 1) labs, 2) unit exams, and 3) daily homework. During the one- or two-week-long unit, the teacher would assign the homework on the unit subject almost daily. But he wouldn’t collect it. Unit tests would be on Thursdays, and he would have them graded by the following day. If you scored below an ‘A’ on the unit test (i.e. 89% or worse), then he would, at that point, collect your pile of homework for the unit. If you had gotten an ‘A’, he would give you full credit for it, sight unseen, and you could toss it. Or, if you were me, you would breathe a sigh of relief, because you hadn’t done any of it. See, I always had a really good grasp of the material without doing the outside homework, and could almost always swing an ‘A’ without it. The teacher absolutely didn’t care: if you got the material without doing the work, then his job was done. Why should you be forced to do useless busywork?

It was a thrilling gamble for me though. I always knew the material well enough to get between 88 and 94 percent on the exams. I ran into trouble when I got an 88 though, which happened fairly often. An 88 on the exam would mean I’d have to produce my homework, and since I’d rarely done much of it, that meant I’d lose a huge bundle of points. There were 50 questions on the exam, so I always had to convince him that one of my incorrect (multiple choice) answers was actually correct, or that two of my incorrect answers deserved half credit.

I could usually talk him into it. In retrospect, it’s hard to say whether I was just absolutely insufferable and he wanted me out of his office, or whether he’d give me the points because he could recognize that I truly knew the material and was passionate about the subject. I’d go in there and explain why MY answer absolutely made sense, and the correct answer, while still a very good answer, was not really a very good analysis of the question that he’d written. I’d explain that the more common isotope has this orbital hybridization; or I’d drag him out into the lab and show him how, empirically, this precipitate does form when using the school’s chemical supply. I always got a thrill testing whether I could talk him into my way of seeing things.

Now I’m a trial lawyer. Go figure.

31

Every teacher I’ve ever had has specifically told me not to do so.

32

I also had a teacher who was very annoying because I had him check to make sure my grade was correct, as my own tally of my grades in the class gave me a higher grade. Said teacher copped an attitude with me, claiming I didn’t even try on my project when I personally showed it and it didn’t work, meaning I got a zero (which is especially annoying since the people who did get it to work did not follow the instructions of not going out and buying anything for the project.) He said that, if I really wanted a good grade, I’d’ve done the project. No, what I did was not cheat on the project. It’s the first and only teacher I’ve ever told off, and I was not ashamed of pointing out that he couldn’t even speak recognizable English in the class, and his students had the worst grades in his department.

33

The one time I tried to do this, the professor refused to take off the points. She said this happened reasonably often, but it was not fair to penalize those who were honest.

34

I’ve been privy to some discussions about grading. Nickel-and-dimers wouldn’t bother me if they genuinely cared about their grades and can make a good argument that a question or assignment was mis-graded. Nickel-and-diming because the student is whiny and is looking for a free ride would bother me.

What would piss me off to no end is the student who did not follow instructions and who thinks he deserves credit anyway. I had a class in graduate school where we had an exam with specific instructions. The students were given instructions on the exam. The students were also given verbal instructions. One student did not follow instructions, and he got half credit for the exam. He whined that he should still be given full credit for the knowledge he demonstrated, and he was told that half credit was still pretty generous; as far as the instructor was concerned, he could have gotten no credit at all. That discussion was fun.

35

Or say, as I do, ‘Dunno, really…I was hired to teach this course by mistake – I’d actually just popped in the chairman’s office to ask directions to the ladies.’

36

I often think, but don’t often vocalize, “That’s great, and when you get to be a professor, you may use your standard for evaluating students’ work. Until then, I’ll use mine. Thanks. Get the fuck out of my office now.”

37

I teach English as a foreign language, and regularly give vocabulary quizzes. I make it clear to the student ahead of time that spelling counts. I will try my best to make sure that all acceptable forms of a word are counted as correct, so cheque and check are both acceptable regardless of which version is used in the textbook. But regular never is and never will be spelled reguler. Good for you for remembering the translation, but the answer is still wrong. That sort of nickel-and-diming gets tiring, yes.