(no subject)

[robinturner]

Thank God the last teaching week of the semester is over. From here on, it's downhill. Boring, but downhill. Standardisation meetings, reading papers, calculating grades, dealing with grade-begging students etc..

I have an interview for this unit head job tomorrow. I still don't know if I want this job - the pendulum has swung pretty much in the "don't want" direction, but I'll go along anyway.

Comments

[madamedisgrace.livejournal.com]

"dealing with grade-begging students" ?


LOL !

I always hear about such people now and then; but I've never met one. Either no one admits that she/he's been begging for grades when among friends, or no one around me does something like that, because I haven't experienced something like this before.
Seriously, what do they say when they want a better grade ?

gosh, I could never do that, it's so embarrasing !

[solri.livejournal.com]

It's amazingly common. I think students come grade-begging to foreign teachers more because they think we are more flexible (which is wrong!).

They come in three categories. The first, and rarest, type, is the really good student who is eligible for a scholarship if they get an A, or needs to get a certain GPA to maintain their scholarship. The second type is the student who is just a few percentage points short of moving up a grade. The third, and most common type, is the one who hasn't done the work and is going to get a D or an F, and is panicking.

What they say depends on their situation. I've heard just about every reason for increasing a grade, from "I didn't really plagiarise that essay" through "I'm on probation this semester" to "I'm getting engaged and if I fail Bilkent, my parents won't let me get married" (really!).

My response is normally sympathetic but firm. I explain that I don't grade students, I grade work. The grade I give has nothing to do with whether I like them as a person, how much they need the grade, or how hard they have worked on this course. I grade what I see, i.e. essays and exams. Where there is doubt about a grade, I give their work to another teacher for an independent assessment. The way we work in FAST is set up so that grades are as objective as possible - we don't have the opportunity to pass students just because we like them, or they need the grade, or they are the son or daughter of someone important (we've had letters from parents who are extremely torpilli, and we always ignore them). In the end, I know that I may have to explain the reasons I gave a certain grade to my colleagues - we check each other's grades, just to be sure they are fair.

The worst thing is when students cry. I know that their grade seems more important to them than it really is, but my reaction is to feel torn between wanting to give them a hug and wanting to scream "For God's sake, it's just a grade - get a life!" For some reason, I have a bit of a reputation in the department as the teacher who makes students cry. Ironically, that comes from the sympathetic approach. When students have committed the mortal sin of plagiarism, I always look at the reason why they do it, and the most amazing things come up - students who are so pressured by work they haven't slept for days, students who are under terrible pressure from their parents to get good grades, and even a case where a girl hadn't been able to do her work because she was being sexually harrassed by a family friend (biri "aile dostu" v.s. diye tanılırsa, hemen ondan kaç!). There are so many reasons to cut students some slack, and I do it as far as I can, but if I change grades for emotional reasons, then I'm not a real teacher.

[oblomova.livejournal.com]

God, I would *hate* to deal with all of that. My father, who taught U.S History at a high school, had what I'm sure is the standard teacher's line: "I don't flunk you. You flunk yourself. Everyone starts the semester with an A. Whether you keep it or not depends upon your work."

[solri.livejournal.com]

That's a nice way of putting it, although I generally assume that everyone starts with a C (i.e. a straight pass with no frills). As I said to my students once, "To get an A, you have to impress me."