We Will Not Negotiate with Terrorists

I began the summer term with 45 students. I ended with 37, seven of whom protested their grades as soon as said grades were filed. I don’t know why my students think that grades are negotiable. I have a “grades are not negotiable” clause on the syllabus. And I’m just about the least approachable professor in my department: even the advisors steer the weaker members of the herd away from my classes (they announce this fact in department meetings). Yet here were 7 students, roughly one-fifth of the class, trying to talk their way into grades they hadn’t earned. The first of the protests came from a student known for his expressions of surprise and disbelief.

Mr. Notme McInnocent was shocked, shocked I tell you, to see the F on his transcript. He wasted no time in sending me a message on his DingleBerry: I want to talk to you about my grade [Note: he didn’t want to discuss his grasp of the material but his final evaluation]. I’ve never received an F in my life [If your work in this class is any indication, it’s criminal that no one has properly branded you the failure that you are]. You graded my final essay wrong. You said I didn’t include any research, and I did [The assignment was to include a reference to a scholarly article; he cited a newspaper review of a film he—get this—wasn’t even writing about]. I feel that I’ve been unfairly treated [Whoa, now. Wait a minute there, junior. Are you suggesting I’m unfairly biased against you? While it’s true that I think you’re a slackadaisical dipshit, I assure you that you earned every bit of that F on your own merits]. I’m graduating in August, and I really need a C in this class [Is there an app for this? A button students can push to insert this utterly irrelevant yet ubiquitous line in every email they send?]. Can we meet to discuss this situation?

Situation? There is no situation. Notme McInnocent enrolled in a class he did not then subsequently attend. The work he turned in showed no understanding of the course material (how could it?). Everything he wrote wallowed in the vaguest of abstractions, as though he had learned (no doubt from my colleagues who hand out As to any troglodytic half-wit who manages to spell his own name [mostly] correctly [most of the time]).

He attended only 5 out of 15 class sessions, though he insists—shockingly—that my attendance records are wrong. If he attended more classes, then why did he earn a grand total of only 4 quiz points the entire semester (65 points were possible)? He couldn’t even take the midterm exam with the rest of the class, so I offered it on another date, without requiring documentation of his reason for missing the test and without assessing a grade penalty for taking the exam late. Yes, I can see how unfairly I have treated this student.

So I sent Mr. McInnocent my standard response to these sorts of student emails:

I assure you that there’s nothing personal or unfair in my grading. I held you to the same standard I used to evaluate the work of every student in the class. Can you honestly tell me that you are about to graduate from this university without knowing the difference between a scholarly article accessed through the MLA Bibliography and a film review published in a newspaper? If this is the case, then you have been let down not by me but by your education. Given your poor attendance, low quiz scores, and non-existent participation, I can only conclude that you didn’t come to class, didn’t do the reading, and didn’t receive the instruction that was made available to all students enrolled in this course. If you didn’t do as well as you had hoped, you might consider how much you actually invested in the course. If you needed to pass this course with a C or better, then why did you miss so many class sessions? And why did you not talk to me about your grades during the semester, when something could have been done to improve them? At this point, the semester is over, and it’s too late to learn the material, rewrite the papers, or earn new grades.

I received no response from Notme McInnocent, and I can only imagine that he’s living in a cardboard box, plotting his revenge on the professor who treated him unfairly. It’s a shame, really, that the only gross injustice here is the student’s own readiness to deceive himself. Let this student be a lesson to all my students: if you don’t want to learn, fine. Don’t learn. But don’t for a moment think you can piss away the semester then talk your way into a better grade. That shit just don’t fly.