The Cranky Professor

These are so standard that you are correct, they will tend to blend in with one another.

Some stand out, though, by reason of their effrontery. I still remember, and complain about, the semester that a student who turned in consistently C work and did not do the allowed rewrites explained to me that he should get an A because he is a Christian and I am a Christian.

I am still appalled decades later.

He said WHAAAT?? It's enough to give you religion.

In the past I've been highly tempted to compose standard letter /responses for predictable /repetitive complaints. And I'll bet you anything in the future, you and your colleagues will be getting template-produced grade protests. Pretty soon we can just have the modems glare at each other.

Look, I feel your pain. Been there, done that, a lot of grading over 35 years. But I think there is an unspeakable truth here: a dominant reason we don't like grade complaints is that we aren't all that confident in our system ourselves. Are we teaching the right things? If they did so poorly, don't I bear some of the culpability? Are my standards all that principled, or are they merely idiosyncratic?

I expect the correct answer to each of these quesetions is --ignore it, you did as well as humanly possible, soldier on. But it is not easy. It is this blank pit of uncertainty that makes teachers say that grading is the hardest--indeed, the only hard--part of the job. We'd do anything, /anything/ to sidestep it, and simply to yield is a fatally alluring option.
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My young friend Eliot graduated from an upscale Calif public high school about 10 years ago. He said the way to get an A at that school was to demand it. Hey, got him in to Yale.

Buce raises a good point, perhaps indirectly.
A big reason a lot of us don't like grade complaints is that we cannot imagine complaining like that ourselves. That, and realizing that giving in to the complainers effectively penalizes the noncomplainers, our younger selves.

Ah, I remember my grading days. Thanks for reminding me of how glad I am that they're over. Premeds....*shudder* To be honest, I've had a few premed students who have been interested in physics and that I've enjoyed teaching, but have gotten more satisfaction out of outreach to 6th graders...

Ok, maybe one of the reasons we dislike grade whiners is that that we aren't too confident about our grading, but I seldom have students on the margin who whine. Usually, my whiners are clearly C students and are whining in the face of a C that probably should have been D.

Generally, however, I disliking whining about grade because I dislike whining, period. It's a bad habit.

Buce, I take your point. Still, to the degree that grades matter for future success, however you choose to define it, the transcript consists of many grades. All of us can be wrong some of the time, and some of us are wrong all of the time, but an undergraduate transcript contains some 30-40 assessments. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be conscientious in our grading, but we shouldn't lose much sleep over it.

Interesting to see that you folks at the college level have complaints over grades also. I don't really get a lot from my high school Freshmen and Sophomores but in general the 'let's look at the record' approach seems to work. They may not like it but find it hard to argue with the numbers.
Of course, as several have noted, how WE got to those numbers is the real issue and to the extent that students who honestly question us require us to focus on our goals for them and us, that is a good thing.

.....Yep, and this does encourage me to be more forceful in making them look at their averages as we go along so that there are no surprises! --MCT

Here's a winner: I had someone complain because I gave her a 95 for her participation grade. That's right, she complained because I gave her an "A." She thought she deserved full credit because, in her words, "sometimes I was the only one answering your questions."

Well, yes, dear, you were. But I can also name about 6 other people who were sometimes the only ones answering my questions. And they all had better attendance than you.

87 for a b+? Isn't that fairly high?

Perhaps her complaint came from an inefficient curve system which improperly delegated grade wealth.

.....nah - my announced standard is 80/81/82/83 = B- (broader than the others), 84/85/86 = B, 87/88/89=B+. --MCT

In my department an A- is any grade between 79%-89%. Isn't that insane!?!? I have to abide by it, but when I read about other grading schemes I get rather mad about the rampant grade inflation that goes on in my dept.

Solidarity to all those dealing with student grade complaints. Yuck!

thought you might be interested in this. Alicia Shepard

The Washington Post

June 5, 2005 Sunday
Final Edition

SECTION: Magazine; W19

LENGTH: 2857 words

HEADLINE: A's for Everyone!;
In an era of rampant grade inflation, some college students find it shocking to discover there are 26 letters in the alphabet

BYLINE: Alicia C. Shepard

BODY:

It was the end of my first semester teaching journalism at American University. The students had left for winter break. As a rookie professor, I sat with trepidation in my office on a December day to electronically post my final grades.

My concern was more about completing the process correctly than anything else. It took an hour to compute and type in the grades for three classes, and then I hit "enter." That's when the trouble started.

In less than an hour, two students challenged me. Mind you, there had been no preset posting time. They had just been religiously checking the electronic bulletin board that many colleges now use.

"Why was I given a B as my final grade?" demanded a reporting student via e-mail. "Please respond ASAP, as I have never received a B during my career here at AU and it will surely lower my GPA."

I must say I was floored. Where did this kid get the audacity to so boldly challenge a professor? And why did he care so much? Did he really think a prospective employer was going to ask for his GPA?

I checked the grades I'd meticulously kept on the electronic blackboard. He'd missed three quizzes and gotten an 85 on two of the three main writing assignments. There was no way he was A material. I let the grade mar his GPA because he hadn't done the required work.

I wasn't so firm with my other challenger. She tracked me down by phone while I was still in my office. She wanted to know why she'd received a B-plus. Basically, it was because she'd barely said a word in class, so the B-plus was subjective. She harangued me until, I'm ashamed to admit, I agreed to change her grade to an A-minus. At the time, I thought, "Geez, if it means that much to you, I'll change it." She thanked me profusely, encouraging me to have a happy holiday.

Little did I know the pressure was just beginning.

The students were relentless. During the spring semester, they showed up at my office to insist I reread their papers and boost their grades. They asked to retake tests they hadn't done well on. They bombarded me with e-mails questioning grades. More harassed me to change their final grade. I began to wonder if I was doing something wrong, sending out some sort of newbie signal that I could be pushed around. Then I talked to other professors in the School of Communication. They all had stories.

My colleague Wendy Swallow told me about one student who had managed to sour her Christmas break one year. Despite gaining entry into AU's honors program, the student missed assignments in Swallow's newswriting class and slept through her midterm. Slept through her midterm! Then she begged for lenience.

"I let her take it again for a reduced grade," Swallow says, "but with the warning that if she skipped more classes or missed more deadlines, the midterm grade would revert to the F she earned by missing it. She then skipped the last three classes of the semester and turned in all her remaining assignments late. She even showed up late for her final."

Swallow gave the student a C-minus, which meant she was booted out of the honors program. The student was shocked. She called Swallow at home hysterical about being dropped from the program. To Swallow, the C-minus was a gift. To the student, an undeserved lump of Christmas coal.

"She pestered me for several days by phone," says Swallow, who did not relent and suggested the student file a formal grievance. She didn't. "The whole exchange, though, made for a very unpleasant break. Now I wait to post my grades until the last minute before leaving for the semester, as by then most of the students are gone, and I'm less likely to get those instantaneous complaints."

Another colleague told me about a student she had failed. "He came back after the summer trying to convince me to pass him because other professors just gave him a C," says Leena Jayaswal, who teaches photography. Never mind that he didn't do her required work.

John Watson, who teaches journalism ethics and communications law at American, has noticed another phenomenon: Many students, he says, believe that simply working hard -- though not necessarily doing excellent work -- entitles them to an A. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard a student dispute a grade, not on the basis of in-class performance," says Watson, "but on the basis of how hard they tried. I appreciate the effort, and it always produces positive results, but not always the exact results the student wants. We all have different levels of talent."

It's a concept that many students (and their parents) have a hard time grasping. Working hard, especially the night before a test or a paper due date, does not necessarily produce good grades.

"At the age of 50, if I work extremely hard, I can run a mile in eight minutes," says Watson. "I have students who can jog through a mile in seven minutes and barely sweat. They will always finish before me and that's not fair. Or is it?"

Last September, AU's Center for Teaching Excellence hosted a lunchtime forum to provide faculty members tips on how to reduce stressful grade confrontations. I eagerly attended.

The advice we were given was solid: Be clear upfront about how you grade and what is expected, and, when possible, use a numerical grading system rather than letter grades. If the grade is an 89, write that on the paper rather than a B-plus.

"The key," said AU academic counselor Jack Ramsay, "is to have a system of grading that is as transparent as possible."

Yet even the most transparent grading system won't eliminate our students' desperate pursuit of A's. Of the 20 teachers who came to the session, most could offer some tale of grade harassment.

"Most of the complaints that colleagues tell me about come from B students," said James Mooney, special assistant to the dean for academic affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences. "They all want to know why they didn't get an A. Is there something wrong with a B?"

Apparently there is. "Certainly there are students who are victims of grade inflation in secondary school," said Mooney. "They come to college, and the grading system is much more rigorous. That's one of the most difficult things to convey to the students. If you're getting a B, you're doing well in a course."

But his interpretation is rarely accepted by students or their parents. And the pressure on professors to keep the A's coming isn't unique to AU. It's endemic to college life, according to Stuart Rojstaczer, a Duke University professor who runs a Web site called Gradeinflation.com. At Duke and many other colleges, A's outnumber B's, and C's have all but disappeared from student transcripts, his research shows.

Last spring, professors at Princeton University declared war on grade inflation, voting to slash the number of A's they award to 25 percent of all grades. At Harvard, where half of the grades awarded are A's, the university announced that it would cut the number of seniors graduating with honors from 91 percent to about 50 percent.

Despite those moves, Rojstaczer doesn't think it will be easy to reverse the rising tide of A's. He points out that in 1969, a quarter of the grades handed out at Duke were C's. By 2002, the number of C's had dropped to less than 10 percent.

Rojstaczer, who teaches environmental science, acknowledged in an op-ed piece he wrote for The Post two years ago that he rarely hands out C's, "and neither do most of my colleagues. And I can easily imagine a time when I'll say the same thing about B's."

Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University Teacher's College and an authority on grading, traces what's going on to the Vietnam War. "Men who got low grades could be drafted," Levine says. "The next piece was the spread of graduate schools where only A's and B's were passing grades. That soon got passed on to undergraduates and set the standard."

And then there's consumerism, he says. Pure and simple, tuition at a private college runs, on average, nearly $28,000 a year. If parents pay that much, they expect nothing less than A's in return. "Therefore, if the teacher gives you a B, that's not acceptable," says Levine, "because the teacher works for you. I expect A's, and if I'm getting B's, I'm not getting my money's worth."

Rojstaczer agrees: "We've made a transition where attending college is no longer a privilege and an honor; instead college is a consumer product. One of the negative aspects of this transition is that the role of a college-level teacher has been transformed into that of a service employee."

Levine argues that we "service employees" are doing students a disservice if we cave in to the demand for top grades. "One of the things an education should do is let you know what you do well in and what you don't," he says. "If everybody gets high grades, you don't learn that."

But, as I'd already seen, many students aren't interested in learning that lesson -- and neither are their parents. When AU administrator James Mooney polled professors about grade complaints, he was appalled to learn that some overwrought parents call professors directly to complain. "One colleague told me he got a call from the mother of his student and she introduced herself by saying that she and her husband were both attorneys," said Mooney. "He thought it was meant to intimidate him."

Though I haven't received any menacing phone calls from parents, Mom and Dad are clearly fueling my students' relentless demand for A's. It's a learned behavior. I know, because I'm guilty of inflicting on my son the same grade pressure that now plays out before me as a university professor.

Last fall when my Arlington high school senior finally got the nerve to tell me that he'd gotten a C in the first quarter of his AP English class, I did what any self-respecting, grade-obsessed parent whose son is applying to college would do. I cried. Then I e-mailed his teacher and made an appointment for the three of us to meet. My son's teacher was accommodating. She agreed that if my son did A work for the second quarter, colleges would see a B average for the two quarters, not that ruinous C.

There's a term for the legions of parents like me. The parents who make sure to get the teacher's e-mail and home phone number on Back to School Night. The kind who e-mail teachers when their child fails a quiz. The kind who apply the same determination to making sure their child excels academically that they apply to the professional world.

We are called "helicopter parents" because we hover over everything our kids do like Secret Service agents guarding the president. (My son refers to me as an Apache attack helicopter, and he's Fallujah under siege.) Only we aren't worried about our kids getting taken out by wild-eyed assassins. We just want them to get into a "good" (whatever that means) college.

"Parents today have this intense investment in seeing their kids do well in school," says Peter Stearns, provost at George Mason University and author of Anxious Parenting: A History of Modern Childrearing in America. "This translates into teachers feeling direct and indirect pressure to keep parents off their backs by handing out reasonably favorable grades and making other modifications, like having up to 18 valedictorians."

High school administrators who haven't made those modifications sometimes find themselves defending their grading policies in court. Two years ago, a senior at New Jersey's Moorestown High School filed a $2.7 million lawsuit after she was told she'd have to share being valedictorian with another high-achieving student. A similar episode occurred in Michigan, where a Memphis High School senior who'd just missed being valedictorian claimed in a lawsuit that one of his A's should have been an A-plus.

That hyperconcern about grades and class rankings doesn't disappear when kids finally pack for college. Along with their laptops and cell phones, these students bring along the parental anxiety and pressure they've lived with for 18 years.

One of my students, Rachael Scorca, says that her parents have always used good grades as an incentive. And they've continued to do so during college. "In high school, my social life and curfew revolved around A's," explains Scorca, a broadcast journalism major. "I needed over a 90 average in order to go out during the week and keep my curfew as late as it was. Once college came and my parents couldn't control my hours or effort, they started controlling my bank account. If I wasn't getting good grades, they wouldn't put money in my account, and, therefore, I wouldn't have a social life."

But most of my students tell me the pressure to get top grades doesn't come from their parents any longer. They've internalized it. "I'd say most of the pressure just comes from my personal standards," says Molly Doyle. "It's also something I take pride in. When people ask me how my grades are, I like being able to tell them that I've got all A's and B's."

During my second semester of teaching, I received this e-mail from a student who'd taken my fall class on "How the News Media Shape History" and wasn't satisfied with his grade. He (unsuccessfully) tried bribery.

"Professor. I checked my grade once I got here and it is a B," he wrote. "I have to score a grade better than a B+ to keep my scholarship and I have no idea how I ended up with a B. In addition, to that I have brought you something from The GREAT INDIAN CONTINENT."

I invited him to come to my office so I could explain why he'd gotten a B, but after several broken appointments, he faded away.

Other students were more persistent, particularly a bright young man who'd been in the same class as the briber. He'd gotten an A-minus and made it clear in an e-mail he wasn't happy with it: "I have seen a number of the students from the class, and we inevitably got to talking about it. I had assumed that you are a tough grader and that earning an A-minus from you was a difficult task, but upon talking to other students, it appears that that grade was handed out more readily than I had thought. Not that other students did not deserve a mark of that caliber, but I do feel as though I added a great deal to the class. I feel that my work, class participation, and consistency should have qualified me for a solid A."

When I ignored the e-mail, he pestered me a second time: "I know it's a great pain in the ass to have an A-minus student complain, but I'm starting to wonder about the way grades are given. I would be very curious to know who the A students were. While other students may have outdone me with quiz grades, I made up for it with participation and enthusiasm. I really feel that I deserved an A in your class. If I was an A-minus student, I assume that you must have handed out a lot of C's and D's. I don't mean to be a pain -- I have never contested anything before. I feel strongly about this, though."

I shouldn't have done it, but I offered to change the grade. My student was thrilled. He wrote, "With grade inflation being what it is and the levels of competition being so high, students just can't afford to be hurt by small things. I thought that you did a great job with the course."

But when I completed the required paperwork, the grade change was rejected by a university official. Though no one questioned me the first time I did it, grades can be changed only if they are computed incorrectly. "How fair is it to change his grade?" an assistant dean asked me. "What about other kids who might be unhappy but didn't complain?"

I e-mailed my student to let him know that he would have to live with an A-minus. "The gods who make these decisions tell me that they rejected it because it's not considered fair to all the other students in the class," I wrote. "The grade you got was based on a numerical formula, and you can only change a grade if you made a mathematical error. I'm sorry."

"That seems illogical to me," he e-mailed back. "If a student feels that a grade was inappropriate and wishes to contest that grade, that student obviously must contact the person who gave it to them. Who was I supposed to contact? What was the process that I was to follow? The lack of logic in all this never fails to amaze me!"

I told him whom to contact. I'm not sure if he ever followed through, but I saw him recently and he smiled and stopped to talk. Nothing was mentioned about the grade.

The day before this spring semester's grades were due I bumped into another professor racing out of the building. What's the hurry? I asked.

She told me she had just posted her grades and wanted to get off campus fast. But she wasn't quick enough. Within eight minutes, a B-minus student had called to complain.

A few hours after I entered my final grades, I got an e-mail from a student, at 1:44 a.m. She was unhappy with her B. She worked so hard, she told me. This time, though, I was prepared. I had the numbers to back me up, and I wouldn't budge on her grade. No more Professor Softie.

Alicia C. Shepard is a journalist-in-residence at American University and is working on a book about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

I am currently a freshman at a small private college in Illinois. It is interesting to me that there aren't any student comments on this board and I thought I might share a bit of my juvenile wisdom.
I have never complained about a grade in my life and do not intend to start now. I personally find students that complain when final grades are posted are more concerned with how it looks on their transcript than with how well that grade reflects their work. If I saw a genuine issue with a grade I received I would address the issue when the grade was received not at the end of the term. These students make the rest of us look bad.
In my experience, as the article posted above reflects, college level grading is rather lax. I have received higher grades in college than I did in high school with half the work. It seems to me that this should not be the case. I believe it is called higher learning?
I also find thatsome of my professors allow to much make up work. I do not think that I should get a paper back with all my grammatical errors clearly marked for me and be given the opportunity to fix it for a better grade. That does not reflect my ability or my diligence. It merely shows that I know how to read and edit a digital text document. I don't want a higher grade that I didn't earn.

Kudos to all of you for sticking up for yourselves! You’re doing a great job!!

Here's a little something a colleague sent to me that I now include in EVERY syllabus, EVERY term/semester, along with a signature to a short contract that says each student has read, understands, & agrees to the terms of the entire syllabus. Enjoy & feel free to use if you'd like:

With regards to your grades on any test, exam, assignment, paper, project, etc.:
1. Your current and past grades in any course, including this one, are totally irrelevant. For instance, if you have always had A’s, but give me C-work, then you will get a C grade for that work.
2. Your need for a certain grade in order to pass the course, graduate, retain or obtain a scholarship, transfer to another college or university, remove probation and continue college, maintain a high G.P.A., appease your perfectionism, inflate your ego, etc., is totally irrelevant.
3. Your I.Q., S.A.T., G.P.A., life experience, work experience, professional status, and whatever else you or others use to measure your intellectual worth are totally irrelevant. For instance, if you have an I.Q. of 180 and a G.P.A of 4.0, but give me F-work, then you get an F grade for that work.
4. Effort is totally irrelevant. For instance, if you put great effort but produce C-work, then you get a C for that work. If you produce A-work, but do so effortlessly, then you get an A grade for that work. However, continual effort will tend to give you the results you want. Do NOT give up! Do NOT hesitate to see me for assistance! Do NOT hesitate to ask questions in class as soon as you are puzzled, lost, perplexed, confounded, mystified, bewildered, overwhelmed, bedeviled…
5. Your family and work situations are totally irrelevant. For example, if you are raising a dozen children, pursuing two full-time careers, and give me D-work, then you get a D grade for that work.
6. The fact that you perceive my presentation of the content of this course as being uninteresting and non-engaging is totally irrelevant. It is time for you take charge of your education and your state of mind.
7. Only the quality of your work and only the quality of your participation are relevant.
IMPORTANT: If you want to discuss your grade on any quiz, test, assignment, paper, project, etc., I expect you to use your critical thinking skills and the knowledge you are supposed to have acquired in this course to convince me that you deserve a better grade. Come well prepared. For if you either describe the problem you are having with your test, assignment, project, etc., inaccurately, or reason incorrectly, you will lose further points on your work. However, if you describe it accurately, AND reason correctly, I will give you the grade you deserve and add further points for your good reasoning. Keep in mind that if I re-examine graded work, and discover that I have mistakenly given you points that you do not deserve, I will deduct those points from the grade.

.....I like that. --MCT

Thank you for the inspiration! I am on my way to defend a grade of F my student earned. Her helocopter mom is demanding an upgrade even though daughter earned 32% on a research paper, failed the final, failed a presentation etc etc etc. How did we come to a place where it's my responsibility to prove how many times the student is absent? The student told her mom there's "no way" she could have been absent so many times. So I have to prove it??? Fortunately, I CAN.

Sure, it would be easier just to change grades, but really, where will this end?