While I totally agree the actual learning is more important than the grade, we live in a world where the grade is really all that matters in getting good placements. Everyone asks how to be a BSD? Its not by being the smartest, its to do well enough that you can get into a good school, network, hopefully know someone, and get good enough grades to get a BB IB, SS ER summer internship.
I can imagine its pretty easy to notice the kids who are actually interested in a topic and the kids who just complain because they want a better grade to make them look more marketable. I would imagine the former is far more likely to get a bump
Indeed, and I didn’t mean to imply anyone go whine to their professor. It was always a conversation between me and my professor. This is also why it’s probably no coincidence I’m in sales. In the end, be they tenured professors or professional buysiders, I’m fairly good at persuading people to see things my way.
How do you all (in particular, the former/current professors, but anyone is welcome) feel about bumping a student from a C+ to B- or B to B+? The sentiment seems to be that a student asking for an A from and A- shouldn’t receive the bump (but should just work harder). Is your policy the same across the board, or is it more acceptable to help students who score lower?
Well, there needs to be a *reason* for it. And it has to be a good one.
The best reason is:
You said points in the range from 37-40 are a B+ and you gave me a B for 36 points, but you forgot to add up the points on page 4 of the exam and that puts me at 39, which is a B+
It can’t be things like:
I really really want a higher grade.
I think your test was too hard, I deserve a higher grade.
If you don’t raise my grade, I won’t get that unpaid internship I’ve been dreaming about at GS.
I really *meant* to give you the right answer.
The guy I plagiarized from is really really smart, so it should be an A.
The instructor’s grade is not “the opening bid of a negotiation of what the final grade should be,” and professors get irritated by students who try this, partly because the implication that professors don’t take their grading responsibilities seriously, and is considered by most to be an attack on their professionalism. The result is that professors with any integrity tend to dig their heels in when challenged in this way.
I would often have a participation component in course totals, which offered a certain amount of end-of-term fudge factors for students who were borderline between grades but clearly trying hard or improving over time. Sometimes it could make the difference, but there were students I was rooting for for whom even pushing those numbers as much as you could was still not enough.
When it came down to ranking participation, I found that I tended to use a 5-point scale: 1=no verbal participation but shows up, 2=I remember at least one moment of asking a question that is more than simple clarification, 3=I remember more than one instance of the same, 4=frequent useful contributions. Then I’d subtract a point if I notice that the student is frequently absent, so you get a 0-4 scale. Students that came to office hours for clarifications or discussions also got points on that scale, so not everything had to be in the classroom.
Good point. Sometimes you don’t want to hold up a graduation, so you begrudgingly put down a D or perhaps a C- and hope they never ask you to be a reference for that material. But usually you do that *before* they have a chance to ask you to bump it further.
I have had students who have come to me to ask for a further bump up and I’ve had to tell them that they really should have gotten a lower grade, so their request has already been granted and hoping for more was basically a non-starter.
I had a colleague that said that any student that came in to discuss changing the grade on their paper had the opportunity to defend their point of view, but that the grade could go up OR DOWN following the discussion. That seemed to cut down on the number of hagglings he had to deal with substantially.
A better strategy is to approach the professor and ask if there is any extra credit or make-up work you can do to improve your grade, rather than have a debate about what the grade should be.
Occasionally a professor will make a mistake gauging how much material was absorbed. When a large proportion of the brightest students end up bombing an exam, that’s often an indicator that there was a mistake on expectations.
The usual strategy is just to grade on a curve. That works when the exam scores don’t bifurcate badly into two groups, one who got one portion and one who didn’t.
The other strategy that can work is to give students a chance to take a second exam and average the scores, or rewrite a paper and add it in to the grade. However, I always took the original syllabus and grade formula stated there as a kind of contract with the students, so you could only change the formula if both the student and the professor agreed, and all students had the right to insist on the original formula for their grade if they did not want to do whatever alternate work was involved.
Not all professors do this, but if I felt that a lot of otherwise good students somehow got slaughtered, I’d often look for a solution like that.
It sucks for the professor, though, because grading is pretty much the worst part of the job.
I can see the rationale behind not preventing someone from graduating, but what if it’s only about the student failing the course (with no immediate consequences on graduation)? Aside from the graduation argument, I don’t see many valid and objective reasons for only bumping a barely failing student but not bumping a high B+ to an A-. Afterall, they both earned what they scored in the course (barring any serious circumstances). If you’re going to bump the barely failing student, why not for the high B+ to A-?
I had some experience with this stuff, so it always perplexed me when students asked for grade bumps even after they neglected to do the equivalent of 2.5% extra credit (pretty much a completion assignment) and they never showed up for class.
Different stuff not just crack.The educational standards in my country is a joke.My brother went to an IVY league equivalent in Iran where the professors were mostly graduates of top global universities.The stuff they taught them is being taught at Masters level here in the U.S and they would torture students by increasing the competitive atmosphere.The other end of this spectrum was my school were as I said was polluted with corrupt faculty and staff.The breakfast guy would drop anyone who didn’t buy him breakfast and his jokes were mostly of sexual nature, I got into a fight with him which ended by me breaking his nose.My only punishment was , taking the course again due to him dropping me( I paid the security chief about 300 bucks so he actually became my slave for the semester). My point is both ends of the spectrum is shit one way or the other.
I don’t know where you went to school or taught at,but most state schools don’t have the capacity to take care of students on an individual basis. I attended a pretty well known private school for one semester before transferring here and the way the professors wanted to hand out extra grades and take care of students was very different to my current school. A typical class here constitutes 400 students, in the private school the number was around 30 to 40. Although my current school is much more recognized globally and very prestigious Tech firms hire here (in my major,the business school is chainsaw shit) I feel that in private schools it’s much easier to get a higher gpa if all else is relatively the same.But thank you for the advice and I am happy that this thread met your strict QC protocol.
Graders should not know the identity of the students. Exams should be transposed to hide identity if need be.The bias and fraud in education is incredible. I’ve been given grades I didn’t deserve and I’ve been docked points when I shouldn’t have. Just ridiculous, but you could argue that is the way of the World. Long live the CFA Program and require the charter for all your investment management employees.