First of all, I am beaming rays of empathy and commiseration to all of you limping through final exams. May a good stiff drink help dissipate tensions over cheating, general flakiness, ridiculous last minute appeals, grade groveling, and that teetering stack of last exams/papers that you can't bear to touch right now. My own highlight reel includes:
- The woman who has missed six out of the last eight classes, but insists on emailing me every time she's absent--she's sick, her kids are sick, she's having eye "issues"--as though her diligent excuses absolve her of any responsibility. Oh, and she'll "definitely be there for the final exam." Such a shame she missed the study session and has no clue what she's being tested on..
- Having SEVEN students drop my class last week; seven times I had to sign drop forms because students realized they are going to fail my class and promptly act to extricate themselves from any culpability whatsoever--wily little fuckers.
- The rock-for-brains student who has acted like MLA conventions are a personal assault on his own convictions all semester--in response to a final exam reading, he wrote, "This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard." The reading was about the power and mutability of language, and if he had bothered to do anything beyond the most cursory, surface-y reading, he would have gotten the import. My imaginary response to Ol' Rockhead: "No, Sir, YOU are the dumbest thing I have ever heard."
- Somehow having my school email account literally vanish, IN THE MIDDLE OF FUCKING FINAL WEEKS--which was kind of nice,actually. What wasn't nice was having IT fix it and realizing I had fifty million fricking emails from desperate slackers.
- The overarching feeling that teaching two of my classes is akin to being in a Walking Dead episode--but the virus here is stupidity, people. And I'm not Sheriff Rick--at this point, I'm more like Shane, when he started to really lose his shit.
Hoping you all avoid zombie bites this week---
These very late withdrawal deadlines are an interesting phenomenon. We have a fairly late (a few weeks past midterm) one, but there's a limit to the number of times students can use it over the course of their college careers. That strikes me as reasonable. I suppose the very late ones do cut down on the "how can I pass/why don't you give extra credit?" conversations, but they strike me as teaching a very bad life lesson (i.e. if you're willing to spend the money, you can just erase the consequences of bad choices and get a do-over). I have no argument with the ability to retake classes (though I might limit it to C-and-below grades); a progression from F to D to B on a transcript tells a story about the student, and, as long as it happens in only a few classes, or the upward pattern is sustained over a number of classes after a rocky start, that story is (mostly) positive. But starting over with a completely clean slate is rarely an option in life; there tend to be kids, and disgruntled spouses/parents/siblings/friends/bosses, and debts, and various other bits of wreckage strewn in the do-over-er's wake.
ReplyDeleteYep, I agree--for most of my students, the drop option seems to be an all too palatable one. The CC policy on this seems to be remarkably laissez-faire--students have to rack up four or five before it starts impacting things like financial aid, etc. I just view it as such a cop-out: fine if a student truly had catastrophic things going on that circumvented their success in my class, but not so fine if they just flaked out and don't want to face an F. It's supremely frustrating!
DeleteOur drop date is the last day of class, but like Cassandra's they can only use that option a limited number of times. Most of our department's champs manage to use up all or most of their late-drop privileges by taking and retaking the basic hamster comp classes until they finally figure out that all they need to do is show up to EVERY CLASS and turn their shit in ON TIME, and the instructor will be happy enough with that to find a way to pass them even if their essays suck.
DeleteOur drop date is the end of week 2 of classes, after that the only options for laggards are to pass, to fail-resit-permitted (so they have to come back on campus early in August and take a nasty exam or spend summer doing several essays etc.) or fail-resit-not-permitted (so they have to redo the class) or fail-retake-not-permitted (which is used with non-core modules and makes them go take a different class or in extreme cases for core modules which forces them to change major). We can award the latter for serious non-attendance issues... and if they care enough to work through the labarynthine appeals process, they are usually MUCH better behaved next time round.
DeleteZoiks.
ReplyDeleteOur drop dead (ha ha) date was April 12--a couple of weeks after finals. I dutifully sent out notices to all and sundry who had no hope of passing, and 4 students dropped. Six more stayed, but stopped doing work. ???? One of those six must be a ghost: he's registered but hasn't been seen since Week 2, and he's never logged into the LMS.
I fully expect him to show up tomorrow (last day) so that his F says (F15) on the transcript, rather than F(2). F(15) means--to the registrar--that he was there all semester but just really sucked and needs to try again, so he won't have to pay back any financial aid he was awarded.
Joke's on him, though. I don't take attendance during the last week.
And by "finals" I meant "midterms"--derp.
DeleteBurntChrome, your "ghost" is, no doubt, a walker, and he will show up to class drooling for brains. Because he has none of his own.
DeleteOur term's over. This term, I entered the lowest final grades of my career: 5, 3, 1, and 0, all students who enrolled, underperformed (or never performed), and ignored the campus-wide announcements about dropping. Oh -- and another guy who showed up for the midterm and final exams but submitted no other work. Given that the exams amount to 40% of the grade, I can't fathom what his game plan was for the remaining 60%.
DeleteAh Miss N. Thrope, I share your pain. Like I said to my class last Wednesday, "How do you people make it to school without getting killed?!" Just don't actually say that.
ReplyDeleteJack Daniel's the Dean is the best kind of administrative support out there. Have a drink on me.
Ah Miss N. Thrope, I share your pain. Like I said to my class last Wednesday, "How do you people make it to school without getting killed?!" Just don't actually say that.
ReplyDeleteJack Daniel's the Dean is the best kind of administrative support out there. Have a drink on me.
Our drop deadline is end of week 2: after that the options are pass or fail-with-resit (i.e. spend the summer teaching yourself the material and come back early to take an exam in August, or submit various essays and projects), fail-resit-denied (retake the module) or fail-retake-denied (which we are allowed to award if a student has lousy attendance/fails to submit most of the work on their second time through a module). Or take the whole semester off and start over... with extra loans, of course.
ReplyDeleteRoll on the summer!
Maybe retaking things is a bad life lesson, but you know, I'm not their parent, and neither is the university. I'm their instructor in Theory of Interpretation of Hamster Weaving. That's all I'm assessing them on. If they want to drop the class, it's their business. If they want to retake it a zillion times, that's their business too. Yes, they will discover that in the business world, and in their personal lives, different models apply and flaking the way they do in class will result in lost jobs, friendships, and romances. That does not strike me as my problem.
ReplyDelete