OK, here’s a hypothetical:
You are a professor in a university. The students in your class have all maintained an “A” average so far - near 100% in all of their grades.
The final exam counts for 20 percent of the total course grade. All of your students, who only need a “C” (which is, 74-76%,) decide that they won’t even take your final exam because they already have such a high grade that they’d pass with a “C” even if they got a zero on the final exam. They’d rather start their summer vacation early. Nobody’s going to take the final exam.
As professor, would you allow these students to do so (“If you want a C instead of an A, sure, you can skip the final exam, up to you”) or would you crack down on such exam-boycotting antics?
Assume that the university’s rules allow you to take academic disciplinary action as you see fit, including flunking students for the whole course entirely even if they technically had the grades to pass.
My university requires them to sit the final, or I can’t enter a letter grade.
Given the hypothetical, sure. I would show up to the exam, prepared, just in case, but I can’t imagine failing the student for being able to do stellar coursework AND math.
As a recent graduate, this exact situation isn’t exactly common, but not unheard of.
More to the point, why would I care? They’re college students, and, hence, adults, and free to make their own choices. If not studying for or taking the final is worth that GPA hit, that’s their call to make. And less grading for me.
I think I disregard such an egregious violation of the contract entered into at the beginning of the course and stick to the syllabus. This isn’t high school; the students paid real, actual, US greenbacks to take the course under a specific set of rules. I, as their hired help, don’t get to alter the deal, Darth Vader style, at my whim.
As a professor, I would recognize my proper role in the exchange and stick to the contract I made with the students.
If the syllabus states that the final exam counts for 20% of the grade and I skipped it and was flunked for the entire course, I’d appeal the grade. Unless there’s a school policy that says students must take the final to pass the class I’m not sure how the teacher can just up and change their own rules like that.
If that’s the way the teacher wants to run the class, that’s fine, but then they need to add a line that states that not taking the final exam will result in an F or I for the course.
Is this college or elementary school? If they screw around, they suffer the consequences. Period. I don’t think profs/instructors should do any policing of student choices like this.
Practically-speaking, a professor has no such power. Weighting is weighting…once it’s been stated, unless he/she makes a statement amending the weighting before/during the last class of the semester, then the weighting must be honored.
In addition, separately, I seriously doubt it’s possible anywhere (restricting this to accredited colleges in the US) to compel attendance at a final by simply threatening a failing overall grade for skipping it, even if the weighting created a passing grade. How would that work? Finals aren’t class, so it couldn’t be an attendance issue. Just my HO.
I don’t see why I’d care other than because of an out-of-control ego. They can do whatever they want - if they’re happy with Cs then they can skip.
That’s what normally happens, I did that once or twice in college (skipped or didn’t study for a final I knew I could do poorly on and still come out okay), what the OP is asking is how you’d feel if the prof said “you skipped the final so even though that should net you a C for the class I’m going to flunk you instead”.
The professor is tossing aside the syllabus and punishing students on a whim. It should be easily overturned on an appeal. Possibly not directly with the teacher, but the chair of the department should have no problem recalculating the grades.
Surely you mean “before/during the last class of the add/drop period.” You can’t change the rules and leave me without (heh) recourse.
“Class, you know that homework assignment all the way back in week 4? I decided to make that 60% of your grade instead of 5%. Suck it, losers.”
When i was an undergraduate, one of the specific rules laid out in my major was that failure to complete any major component of the course (exam; term paper, etc.) meant that the student had not met the requirements of the course, and could not, therefore, receive a passing grade.
It was very clearly spelled out in the syllabus, and in the department’s own handbook. It was not a matter of a professor’s whim.
But this is the sort of rule that does need to be laid out in advance, either at the university level (in the student handbook), or by the professor in the syllabus. If the students are not told beforehand that failure to complete the exam will automatically result in a failing grade for the course, it’s unfair to spring it on them after the fact.
In my own courses, i tend to walk a middle path. I don’t automatically fail students for missing the final exam, or failing to hand in their major paper, but i do penalize them beyond the simple absence of the paper grade. So, in the OP’s case, if missing the final exam left the student with a numerical grade of 75% (C) for the semester, the student would actually end up with less than that, because i would also assess an additional penalty, typically 5 points or one “grade step” (i.e., C -> C-).
So, in the OP’s hypothetical scenario, the student would basically have to ask: Is a C- good enough?
What are the grounds, exactly, for academic disciplinary action? If the students were rude about it, that might be one thing. If they published blogs saying, “Fuck this stupid prof and his idiot test, I’d rather have a C,” then there might be a violation of rules of etiquette.
On the other hand, if they signify, ahead of time, their intention, then that sounds entirely within the bounds of etiquette.
If they just fail to show up? So it goes. The get C’s, the prof gets his own early vacation (no papers to grade) and everybody goes home with what they contracted for. No grief, no messy paperwork, no appeals procedure, no lawsuits.
(I have seen – and been in – situations where the final exam wouldn’t make any difference: I got my ‘A’ even if I show up and fluff the final completely. In several instances, my profs have privately informed certain of their students that the final isn’t necessary. In one lovely case, the prof asked me to take the test anyway – as a “control.”)
If the syllabus laid out a specific penalty for skipping the final, I would apply that penalty as laid out in the syllabus. I would probably not choose to implement such a policy myself, but if my department had such a policy, I would abide by it (and include it in the syllabus I handed out).
Absent any such policy, I would grade the final as a zero, and let that come out in the grading formula however it comes out.
And I was actually in a situation once in high school where I could have skipped the final and still gotten an A (the teacher was very generous with extra credit on homeworks). I didn’t study much for that final (but then, I never studied much), but I did put in a good-faith effort on the final anyway, just for the principle of the thing.
Unless my syllabus says that an assignment is a criterion requirement, I can’t change my rubric to require it. Frankly, if a bunch of students elected to take Cs, it would only improve my teaching review.
How so? The OP explained what the university’s policies were in this hypothetical.
So any student in the class had agreed to the contract of the professor having the power to fail students. It seems to me that any student arguing that he’s entitled to a grade is the one trying to alter the terms of the contract.
Hmm, that’s a great question. I’ve had professors change weighting mid-stream to HELP people’s grades. Nobody complained,either. I wonder if they really could get away with the reverse…
No. Changing the weighting mid-stream to help is essentially modifying the contract with all parties’ consent. If a student really wanted to keep to the prior weighting, he or she could do so, but why would anyone?
Changing it in the other direction could also only happen with consent of all parties, and presumably the students would not consent: why would they?
Colleges around these parts (Philippines) can give a grade of “Incomplete” to a student with a passing standing but has otherwise failed to complete all the course requirements, e.g., lab report, term paper, final exam, or whatever. It goes on the transcript as “INC” and you might not be allowed to register for an advanced course if the incomplete course is a prerequisite. You certainly won’t be allowed to graduate with any grade of INC. It’s more of a hassle to deal with incomplete grades as there’s additional paperwork to perform to officially change the INC to a final grade.
Right, but it seems to me that this begs the real question being asked by the OP: would you have such a policy on your syllabus in the first place ?
Basically every academic in this thread, and every academic i know, sees the syllabus as a contract that we are supposed to abide by. I acknowledge, and so do all my colleagues, that we don’t simply get to make up new rules in the last week of the semester in order to fuck with students.
I think that, hidden in this question, is a more fundamental issue of how students are assessed. As i said, when i was an undergrad, one of the basic rules of my program was that failing to complete a major course component rendered a student ineligible to pass the whole course.
While some people might see this as unreasonable, i’m not sure that it is. After all, in some areas of study there are particular skills or areas of knowledge (or whatever) that might be considered essential, but that also might not, by themselves, constitute a majority of the points for the class. For example, in my own discipline (history), one possible requirement for a class might be to research and write a long term paper. Even if that paper is only worth (for example) 25% of your course grade, it might be reasonable to argue that failure to produce such a paper means that you have failed to demonstrate one of the essential skills required in a history class. And if you’ve failed to demonstrate an essential skill, should you pass the class? I’m willing to bet that there are, in other disciplines, certain skills or knowledge that are essential to a passing grade.
Police officers spend most of their careers not using their guns, but if a recruit can’t hit the side of a barn at the practice range, then he or she might not get to be a cop, no matter how good they are at everything else. If you can’t perform CPR, you might not get to be a lifeguard, no matter how good you are at swimming. Similarly, if you can’t write a term paper, or demonstrate your understanding of material from the duration of the semester, you might not get to pass a university class.
My university has an option for an “Incomplete” also, but I am only supposed to grant such a grade if the failure to complete the work is due to a university-approved reason (documented illness; family crisis; religious holiday; etc.). In the OP’s case, where the student just blows off the exam, and Incomplete would not be considered appropriate.