I had a take-home midterm due the same day I was leaving town. So I e-mailed the instructor about the situation, and he said to just leave the midterm in his mailbox at the faculty offices. I turned it in several days early, that way if there were any problems, I could know about it before I left.
This evening he was handing out graded midterms, and guess who didn’t get one? Me! :mad: I asked him if he had received my midterm, he said he didn’t even get it at all :eek: I reminded him of my e-mail and assured him I did complete the midterm on time, I left it in his mailbox (with another professor of mine as witness) but he never got it. He asked me if I had a copy of it on my hard drive, and I said yes. He assured me that if I e-mailed him the midterm, he would grade it no harm, no foul.
Still, I’m pretty pissed. I was hoping to see what I got on it. I’m kind of afraid to make any changes (in part because it was due last thursday, and it wouldn’t really be fair that I get a week extra time to work on it, and also because I’m paranoid I’ll change something which might make the finished result worse ). I don’t know how he missed it.
I am pretty quick to accept personal fault (if that is the case). But I had written the midterm and placed it in his mailbox under witness of another professor (who helped me find his mailbox), very carefully making sure I did not place it in the wrong one by accident. The only way he could not have gotten the midterm is if he hasn’t checked his mailbox at all, but it has been over a WEEK since I dropped off the midterm, and there were other packages and stuff in there. Come on! :mad:
OMIGOD! I can’t beleive that bastard refuses to grade your mi—
Oh, wait. He is going to grade it.
BUT FUCK HIM TOTALLY for PENALIZING YOU for TURNING IT IN LA—
Oh, wait. He’s going to grade it without penalty.
A mistake was made. He is rectifying the mistake. The only harm done to you (if it even actually qualifies as “harm”) is that you have to wait a day or so longer than the rest of the class to get your grade.
I think you need to chill out, if only for the sake of your own cardiovascular system.
Well, it doesn’t really matter how nice someone is after they’ve made an error. The error can still be annoying.
For example, I had to send a price list to one customer about five times. They were nice enough about not receiving it, didn’t throw a fit or anything, but that didn’t mean that I could just say, “Oh well, I sent it.” I had to keep sending it, over and over and over and that’s annoying, no matter how nice they are.
(A while later, it turns out they had gotten the price lists and someone had filed them before they got to the person on the cover sheet.)
The ultimate cause for ire is that I will get my grade a week later, and if there is anything I can do to re-write the paper or improve the grade somehow, I will have to wait until I see how well I did.
Its not a ‘day later’. The class only meets once a week. He said if I emailed it to him, he’d have it graded and sent back to me next Thursday. This is my last semester, and I want to make sure I finish it by doing the best that I can. So cockups like this really piss me off right now. I’d like to get an ‘A’ in the class, but because I get relatively little feedback on my papers, and there are so few assignments in the whole class (4 papers) there isn’t a lot of room to improve or adapt to his expectations. Delays like this could eventually hurt my grade in the long run, if there was some error made in interpreting the midterm topic or format.
Okay, and what proof is there that the teacher messed up? Our school has a system whereby papers being handed in not to the teacher must be stamped by the office.
I had a teacher inform me at the end of the semester that I was barely hanging on to a D instead of the B that I thought that I had. Big surprise to me when he told me that , since I didn’t take the 2nd test out of the five he gave, that I was borderline failing.
I told him that not only did I take the test but that he graded it, handed it back to me, and then after my review of his comments, returned the test to him which was the SOP. I even opened my notebook and showed him my notes for that day’s lecture where I logged the test grade in my notes.
Apparently he lost or didn’t mark my grade.
He said that it was my responsibility to correct the grading mistakes. I told him that, since he waited till the end of the semester to tell me that the test was missing it was a little fucking difficult to do that now. The prof in all his complete lack of logic failed to understand that I couldn’t fix a problem that I was unaware of. I finally got through to him when I kicked it up a bit and called him a useless Nazi who was incapable of teaching the course and even less capable of managing a grading system. I told him that I was NOT going to take the final and I expected a C or higher on the grade. I got a C. I found out later that he actually WAS a former engineer for the Germans during WW2 and my Nazi comment must have freaked him out.
I had a high school teacher lose a book report I wrote. He made me look through all his papers to look for it.
I told him what it had been about, he admitted he remembered reading it but because we couldn’t find it, I ended up with a B instead of an A that card marking.
I wasn’t so pissed because I ended up with an A final grade in the class.
Oh, in case you’re wondering, the course was physics.
Seriously, man, get a grip. If you are really certain that you’re going to be academically crippled by waiting a week, I think that you would be justified in asking him if he could grade it sooner, and let you pick it up from him. However, be aware that this could very well cause him to roll his eyes and forever consider you an obsessive twink. If you’re so concerned about getting an A, I recommend that you stop making a mountain out of this molehill and focus your energies on learning the material.
Read Bubbadog and Odinoneye’s posts if you want to see a case where someone has an actual cause to complain about their prof’s reaction to losing a paper.
In college, a prof lost my midterm and refused to let me take it again since the rest of the class had already taken it. He did, however, “average out” my other grades such that I wasn’t penalized for it.
I was still pissed, though, cause I was certain I did phenomenally well on the exam. In fact, it was about a theoretical piece of computer science that I use all the time in the real world now, I remember it so well (finite state machines.)
The first real ‘research’ paper I did was an assignment at age 9 where each of us in the class had to write about a country in South America…was actually a bit of fun; I still remember putting together bits of coloured paper to make the covers of the report the same as the country’s flag…everyone worked ages on those things, really tarting them up – so we handed in our little papers, and waited…and waited…and waited – I think everyone was pretty eager to see how they’d done and if the teacher was pleased…and waited – literally weeks later someone finally piped up in class and asked when we would get our marked papers back, and the teacher sort of laughed dismissively, as if suddenly remembering all about them, and admitted she had not only not bothered to mark them, but had binned them