<p>I received poor (very mediocre) grades for 2 classes from a prof this term…I suspected that my prof graded by impression, and that he had not really looked at what I had written for my final papers. I usually do very very well in school and these two poor grades really hurt my GPA. Is there a way I can appeal for higher grades? What is the best thing I can do?</p>
<p>Yes, there is a way you can appeal for higher grades. What that way is will vary from school to school, so you should look it up in your student handbook. It is likely that your first step is going to involve going to the professor with a well-prepared argument that you deserved better.</p>
<p>What I suspect will be the most helpful thing for you to do is to dig out your syllabus, copy down the explanation of how grades will be calculated, pull out everything you’ve already gotten a grade on and plug it in, and have people who know what they’re doing read over everything you’ve submitted but don’t have a grade for yet. Many students don’t understand how the grading works in a given class and don’t realize how well they need to do on the final projects in order to achieve specific final grades – I’m not saying you’re one of them, but it’s worth looking at anyway.</p>
<p>The reality is that while I know there are some times when the professor makes an error and doesn’t catch it, or for some other reason submits the wrong grade, I’ve known a lot of specific individual students who have thought that the professor made an error, and in none of those cases was the student right. You want to be as sure as possible that the person who miscalculated wasn’t you <em>before</em> you make an accusation, especially if this professor is in your major department (which seems likely since you had 2 classes with them this semester).</p>
<p>If the professor is an adjunct (gets hired a term at a time to teach specific courses) this may be time-sensitive, but if they’re a member of the department on an ongoing basis you can afford to take your time and make sure of your facts before you contact anyone at your school, and I would suggest that you do so.</p>
<p>If you want my help in trying to figure out what happened, feel free to post here or to PM me. Either way, good luck.</p>
<p>maybe you had grammar mistakes? “at college” seems like awkward phrasing to me. usually it’s “in college”. Also, “that he had not really looked at what I had written” –> I’m not expert, but the grammar is clearly wrong here. It should be “he did not really look at what I had written (wrote?”. I heard that some professors give automatic Cs and Ds if a paper has too many grammatical errors. That’s why many colleges require freshman to take intro writing courses.</p>
<p>Also, if you have a professor that has office hours, you could always go in, not to say that you think you deserved a better grade, but to ask what you could do better/what was lacking. Odds are your professor can provide plenty of good reasoning for the grade you got and you might not feel so bitter afterwards.</p>
<p>Carefully look through the original assignment that was given and the syllabus to see if your instructor mentions any other expectations. Carefully look through each part of your graded paper and, to yourself, consider each area you may have lost points. Do not make up any excuse at this time involving how you think it should be graded or how another instructor grades instead realize those change and become more demanding as you advance through your education. Instead, try and learn from your mistakes first and then approach your professor with your best arguments for each point you outlined earlier and make sure to reference his own syllabus/assignment/words because that is the contract between him and you. If your professor uses e-mail (I make this distinction because some simply don’t like it for whatever reason) try and get down all of your thoughts onto there instead; this gives you the opportunity to give yourself a day to cool off before editing/revising and sending. That e-mail should show you really do care about this and want it to be resolved.</p>
<p>And, please, don’t say anything about your GPA or what grade you think you deserve.</p>
<p>Thanks for your responses. I feel that I don’t have a strong case for an appeal, coz these two classes are English classes - and grading English papers can be a pretty subjective affair. I’m an English major, and I just know that these two papers I have submitted are definitely not inferior to the other English papers that I have submitted before…</p>
<p>Everyone believes that their paper is perfect. That’s not always the case. Something that I would recommend since this happened in your major course would be to go talk to them about what you did wrong and how to improve your writing in the future.</p>
<p>I’m an engineering major and was actually basing my experience from my last writing composition (English) course. Using specific examples I was able to make a counterargument for several comments in the professor’s review of my paper and went from a low “C” to a mid “B” (ended that class with an A) and more importantly learned a lot from my mistakes.</p>
<p>Since you’re an English major I would expect that you would really find value in whatever criticism your professor gave if only because it is close to your major and you are likely to take more advanced courses that use the skills these classes were meant to develop. Simply do not chalk it up to being subjective; I’m sure the assignment and/or syllabus provided SOME specific requirements or maybe he just talked about them. If something is subjective then try and see if you can refute it with facts. I know nothing about you, your professor, or your individual assignments, but this could be an important part of your progress and you should not just let it slip by.</p>
<p>I would agree with OKgirl: if you aren’t appealing the grade, go to the prof., make it very clear that you aren’t appealing the grade (they will assume you are because almost nobody wants to talk about how to improve their work – it’s just a cover for appealing the grade), and ask to go over the papers closely so you can see what the problem is and what you need to do better.</p>
<p>If you are appealing the grade, I’d still suggest going to the professor, but making it clear up front that you’re approaching in a slightly more hostile manner: you want to know why you got the grade that you did, but once you find out you may want to protest it. </p>
<p>In either case, the grading is probably not as subjective as you think. I’ve graded philosophy papers, and that’s another subject where most people think the grade is “subjective” – once the teaching team agrees on what we’re looking for, though, I’ve never known TAs and profs to want to assign different grades to the same paper. It is possible that there were different criteria here than on your earlier papers. IIRC you were a sophomore during the spring semester. The English classes you’ve taken before these two may have been ones that were designed for students from all departments, to satisfy distribution requirements. Those classes are likely to have lower standards than classes for English majors, even though they’re being offered at the same level. These classes may have been designed so that you would progress, with each successive paper being expected to meet a higher standard, whereas a lot of “freshman English” courses are designed so that you meet about the same standard with one successive “kind” of writing after another. Or they may have been focused on a specific kind of writing you haven’t been expected to produce in your coursework so far: if you’re discussing some specific theme in “King Lear” the standard will be different than the one used in prior classes where you may have been answering the question “What talent of mine is most important to me?”</p>
<p>If you appeal, the professor turns you down and you still want to push it , the next step is likely to be the department chair, and after that a dean of some sort. Your professor should be able to tell you whom you should go to if you don’t get satisfaction from her.</p>
<p>Again, knowing nothing about you, your professor, the assignment, your track record in these classes, your track record in other English classes, your track record in school generally, etc., I think it is more likely that I would agree with your professor than that I would agree with you – but that’s not really a meaningful thing for me to say because it’s all about the specific details here. If you’ve taken the time to think about this, and you’ve gone over any information you may have been given about why you got these grades (did you get your paper back? were there comments? (sometimes there aren’t on the last paper of the semester)), and you still don’t think you were graded fairly, and you still think you’ve been treated unfairly, you shouldn’t let the fact that a lot of people who think they’ve been treated unfairly are wrong stop you.</p>
<p>djvu, not to sidetrack the thread, but your corrections are wrong. You changed his meaning. “Had not looked at” would be the past perfect, whereas “did not look” would be simple past. The tense of the entire narrative is past already, and since this excerpt is describing a segment past of the primary tense, it needs to be past perfect. </p>
<p>Don’t go by sound, learn the rules ;)</p>
<p>-An SAT Tutor</p>
<p>And as for the topic at hand- there tends to be a time limit on these things. It’s probably too late to approach the Professor at this point. Did you get the papers back with comments? Are the comments blatantly unfounded? If not, what makes you think the Professor was wrong?</p>