The TA’s rant is at least justified by boorish behavior of whining about grades. At one school ds had considered applying to, my ds and I were subjected to a rant by the UG adviser who told my ds he needed to slow down and master material instead of rushing ahead. He ranted about the kids in his classrooms who were NMS and top students but who didn’t know how to think on their own and wanted everything spoonfed with answers supplied. He went on and on about how they couldn’t learn physics and kids were crying every time he gave tests. It was a pretty horrific rant which lasted several minutes. This prof did not know anything about our ds other than ds asking questions about entering with advanced standing. Ds was interviewing the dept to see if they could meet his academic needs.
All that UG adviser succeeded in doing was having us walk out of the dept thanking our lucky stars that we escaped and that ds knew the dept’s attitude!!
I’ve gotten a grade as low as a 5 on a scale of 100. I didn’t fall to pieces, I dropped the class. I retook it the next semester and got a C.
I’ve gotten the highest score in the class on an exam only to find that the grader gave me credit even though I had gotten the problem wrong. I went and asked them to lower my grade. I didn’t need or want the charity. Someone else deserved the accolades.
Other times I’ve gotten the only perfect score, and I was proud knowing that I earned it. I only want what I earn.
When I TA’d we had a policy that if a student wanted any part of the exam regraded, the ENTIRE exam would be regraded under high scrutiny. Few students took that risk unless they were sure that we actually made a mistake. Students who asked for a regrade also had the rest of their exams that semester photocopied before they were handed back. Of course someone was caught cheating by this method. What goes around comes around.
For partial credit, during the grading session, we would all go through a problem to look for the ways in which students could mess it up and came up with a scoring rubrick. When student’s came to nickel and dime for partial credit, we would just cite the rubrick we set out for everybody.
As an instructor, I never cared if my grading kept you out of med school, law school, or if you ended up on academic probation. Our grading was supposed to be uniform and it was unfair to everybody else for that kind of stuff to be a consideration.
Mom2aphysicsgeek,
That’s a perfect example of the issues being on both sides. Agreed, students shouldn’t whine or cry if they don’t like their grade. But a faculty member with a serious attitude problem about his students should find another career.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Regarding the comments on the OP’s attitude: given that we allow such threads as “Say It Here…” and “Why is This a Thread,” and lacking any additional information, let’s just assume that the TA is looking to vent and not read anything else into it, shall we?
I don’t hear an attitude problem at all from the OP, agree with @classicrockerddad, you want an A, your earn it. TAs aren’t there to make sure everyone is happy and loved. They aren’t mommy.
@jym626 The irony is that our ds was not rushing. I did everything in my power to slow him down! He always had either the highest or one of the highest grades in his physics classes, even though he was a high school student. He continues to maintain a 4.0 and took 400 level physics classes as a freshman. That professor directed his rant toward a student who had spent all of high school conducting physics thought experiments, purchased every Great Courses physics and astronomy lecture he could with his own money, and created independent courses around dark matter and black holes.
Stereotyping is always a bad idea. If he had taken 1/2 the amt of time he spent ranting asking ds questions, he would have recognized that ds breathes physics.
The worst test I ever had was organic chemistry multiple choice. No partial credit for getting partway through the reaction. I was not pre-med, but had to take orgo for my major. Was very happy to finish that class!
I think the TA notified is the TA for the student’s recitation. May or may not be the one grading the test, but is the contact for the student.
Scoring poorly on one exam implies the class was ill prepared for the test, but I fail how to see how that translates into them being “average” students.That’s quite an assumption to make based on one test score. Isn’t it possible to struggle in one class but excel in others? Does a C on one assignment in one class cancel out A averages in 4 others, dropping a student from a strong to a merely average student?
There’s a reason my dyslexic, dyscalculic, and dysgraphic daughter has never seen the inside of our local public school and the tendency of some educators to apply labels such as this is a big part of it. After she scored in the single digits on a 2nd grade standardized test the district’s goals for her were to achieve incremental increases so she could reach acceptable state standards (the 34th percentile) by the end of 5th grade. They mentally classified her as ‘below average’ which limited what they believed she could accomplish.
Our goals for her were much higher. We took her diagnosis and prepared a homeschool program. She met state standards by the end of 3rd grade and nearly doubled that score by the end of 4th. Six years later she consistently scores above the 75th percentile and our goal for the next two years is to increase that as well. Children have a way of living up, or down, to our expectations. I wouldn’t want my daughter to have a professor who decided she was only “average,” especially based on such flimsy evidence.
I would suggest OP encourage students to set high goals and map out a plan to try to reach them. Study smarter, not harder. Labeling them as “average” helps nobody. Doing so may make you feel better in departmental meetings when you learn that other professors’ students are getting A’s and B’s, but it doesn’t solve anything.
skieurope,
My comment about the professor’s attitude problem (the faculty member) was in response to the post by mom2physicsgeek. That said- if a new poster comes to the parents forum to complain about his/her students, well… its going to get responses from the parents. If the OP just wanted to vent, **they **could have posted in the “say it here” thread, not started this thread with an inflammatory title. Seems to me if they chose to start a somewhat potentially confrontational thread, calling students whiny and entitled (even if they are!), they need to be prepared for the responses of all shapes and sizes…
To continue, mom3physicsgeek,
That is really sad that this professor didnt seem to chose to take the time to converse with your son and get a feel for his knowledge, his passion, his depth of familiarity with the subject matter to see that he might have a fabulous diamond in the rough sitting in his office. If he had a knee-jerk response without listening to your son, then yes, I think he (the professor you are describing) may have an attitude problem and/or burnout, if he’s been in the profession a while. Time for a sabbatical, perhaps.
My kid is at a competitive college and i’m getting a good look from the other side. I’d say they complain about their grades for two…actually 3 reasons:
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many have scholarships/grants based on getting a certain GPA at the end of the semester. When they see the possibility of losing their funding to continue in college, they freak.
many others have grad school/med/whatever in their sights and the emphasis on the data/GPA is insane.
some students begin to understand that some versions of the same class are easy compared to other versions of the class. In other words, the easier versions (teachers) of the required courses fill up early…and it’s tough to see dorm mates getting higher scores in the same course.
[/QUOTE]
That said, I would not inflate grades if they are not deserved.
I always felt the old “look to your left look to your right” speech commonly associated with law school (in the olden days) prepared people pretty well for the brave new world of law school grades.
The OP sounds a lot like the speech I gave my own kids when they started college. I told them in no uncertain terms that they were now average. Aced HS calculus? Coasted through HS? Etc?? Guess what, so did most of your new classmates. That’s what makes you average.
The curve is better than what one of my professors used. A randomly filled out scantron called “the monkey.” If you could not beat the monkey, that was not a good sign.
We had a professor in grad school who taught an intro (grad level) social psych class. It was sadly clear form his lectures that he was not, shall we say, aging well. But when we got our first exam, it had nothing, NOTHING to do with the chapters assigned or the material presented. They curved the test. I got the highest grade (something like a 96). How’d they arrive at the grade? They doubled our actual score and added 10! Sadly, the professor’s dementia became pretty fulminent and he was replaced shortly thereafter.
This reminds me a conversation I once had with my son’s elementary school teacher. I explained to her that my son came home very upset because he wrote a (what I thought) very good 3 page story and got a “3”, while the kid next to him barely wrote half a page and also got a “3”. He got everything right on a test and got a “3”, the kid next to him barely scored 2/3 right and also got a “3”. He thought it was patently unfair and didn’t understand why he should even work hard anymore, if everyone just automatically gets a “3”. The teacher said the reason the other kid gets a “3” is because that’s a level 3 work for him, because he usually wrote no more than a couple of sentences, and scored less than 1/3 right on his tests. I said you mean to tell me the grades are actually for effort rather than actual quality of work? She said, more or less, yes.
The OP wonders where kids got this attitude that they should be rewarded for effort rather than quality of work? Well, it starts right there in elementary school, and carries on all through middle school and high school. We are rewarding mediocrity over excellence, entitlement over hard work. Now the same poison is inflicting higher ed.
Wait a minute - are we married?! My husband had that policy when he TA’d too. It really cut down on the number of students who bugged him for an extra point or two.
A lot of classes have that policy. I only had 3 regrades through all of undergrad. One was just that they added up the points wrong so I asked them to fix that, which was a pretty simple one. One was just blatantly misgraded (9 questions, 3 questions each graded by one grader each, and one of those graders just blatantly misgraded) and one where I probably could have let it go but there was one question where they simply did not ask what they intended to ask based on the answer key, or at most favorably the question was at least ambiguous. Probably only that last one would I have reconsidered had that been the policy. That last one was more about me trying to vent about imprecise language on an exam than actually caring if I got more points though.