Monday, October 3, 2011

I'll do it when I get "a round tuit"

Dear Functionally Illiterate Students:

Midterm week was two weeks ago. I generously gave you a floating time period to do this, yet 99% of you waited until the last hours on the last day. Then I had to wait to get your testing information back from the assessment center before I could actually start grading. And of course three of you had life-or-death emergencies that required my giving makeups as late as Thursday of last week.

Because the drop date was fast approaching, I made grading your midterms my first priority so you'd have averages in time to decide whether to continue. Notice I said grading. I very specifically told you that comments would not come until the following week and that I had one more pressing set of assignments I needed to get back to you before I put the midterm comments in my LMS. For my punctuality and good communication skills, here's what I got in return:

Perfect Percival: "What's wrong with my paper? I thought it was great! Did I not follow some little direction you gave or what?"

Transfer Student Tina: I don't understand why I flunked! I did everything right! When are you going to tell me what I did wrong? This class HAS to transfer to State U, so please send me info right away.

Clueless Claude: I've decided I need to drop this class [at 11:59 p.m. on the drop date], but I can't figure out how. Can you just take care of this for me? (This after I sent an email about the drop date, told them they had to email me for a "drop consultation appointment" ahead of time, and gave them the deadline of 11:00 p.m., set by our system, for all this to take place.)

So in reply here (since God forbid I do it elsewhere), here are the answers:

Percival, you blew it because you didn't read the damned directions. And I don't mean some "little" thing. I'm talking major issues that anyone who's made it past freshman comp should have been able to follow.

Tina, you blew it because you also didn't read the damned directions, nor have you apparently been paying attention to anything we've been doing all term. What you wrote looks nothing like what I've been attempting to teach you. I know it's you and not me because not one of your classmates made the same error. State U is not going to put up with this crap in writing for your major. I don't have to put up with it just because I'm at a CC.

Claude, you can't drop the class. The system is closed, you have no good excuse, and I have neither the time, energy, nor desire to advocate for you with the admins. Grow a pair, do your work, and you might make it out alive with a C.

I will get those midterm comments up this week when I get "a round tuit." And since I seem to have left my only one on this page, it could be awhile.

3 comments:

  1. I've seen an increase in Percival and Tina-type reactions in the last few years, and it's definitely increasing my aversion to the already unpleasant task of grading. The fact that LMSes often allow students to view grades without comments is part of the problem(while I understand your particular situation and think that posting grades without comments was the right approach, I've never posted grades without comments, or, in the case of very short assignments, some standard explanation of a simple grading system). Students' attitudes, however, are a bigger part of the picture, and can be a real barrier to learning. I'm not a trained psychologist, or hostage negotiator, or diplomat, and trying to talk some of them down to a point where we can actually have a discussion about the project at hand and how it (or the next one) could be improved seems to be getting harder and harder. And the reactions are just as strong to grades on assignments that I've deliberately planned to be preliminary, low stakes, etc., etc., to give them an idea of what I'm looking for early on, *before* the high-stakes assignments kick in. Repeating over and over that these are preliminary, low-stakes assignments seems to help a bit with many of them, but doesn't solve the problem entirely.

    Some of the blame has got to fall on their parents, and on earlier teachers (or at least the test-oriented teaching approaches they were required to follow). I'm pretty sure the economy plays a part, too. Whatever the cause, the result is definitely more misery for all involved (including the students; going through life with the conviction that anything less than perfect = disaster has got to be tough).

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  2. P.S. Since when do midterms (even essay/short-answer based ones) get individual comments? The most I've ever done is offered some oral feedback to the whole class on what constituted an especially strong answer. Could you do that (in written form or as a screencast if this is an online class)? Individual comments on what sounds like a timed test seem like overkill. And they'd get their feedback quickly (and could make appointments with you if they didn't understand how their responses differed from what you were looking for).

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  3. Alas, at Large Urban Community College, we are required in my department to put comments on all major writing assignments, and the midterm and final exams are designated as essays of at least 500 words. In one class, I have leeway on whether to give a midterm, and I'm actually considering skipping it altogether and just going with a massive, potentially grade-crushing final essay since I am so tired of listening to the complaints about having to take a test while also working on a research assignment.

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