Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Why did I get this grade?

Collapse
This topic is closed.
X
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #31
    I'm making a note of all these dead white guy jokes on my Bradbury.
    "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

    Comment


    • #32
      Quoth Miss Fatale View Post
      It smacks of entitlement -- "So what that you wrote I did X, Y, Z wrong, I still should have gotten an A/B/Passing grade." It suggests the student didn't read my comments, which is disrespectful to the amount of time I put into it. And plus there's the suggestion I don't know how to do my job.

      I wish I could just say, "Because that's the grade you got."
      I tell students who are like that, "That's the grade you gave yourself." Because for their written assignments they have detailed rubrics that tell them exactly what must be in a paper in order for them to get an A.

      The spoken English as written English drives me nuts, even though I tell them repeatedly not to write this way.

      Quoth Merriweather View Post
      Went to the instructor, he started to give me his official "that's the way it is speech" as he looked up his grade book, then switched to an apology as he realized that yep, he'd made the mistake, it should indeed be an A. He was quick to get it changed for me too, which I appreciated.
      I encourage students to review their exams individually with me, and to ask questions if they don't understand the why of their grade. Ditto for written work. I let them know from the outset that I'm human too, and that if I make a mistake in counting their points, or if they don't get credit for something they earned that I will fix those errors at once.

      It's the, "but couldn't it also be X" complaints I don't like. First of all, if you really thing so, show me where in your text book it says so and I'll consider it. But more often than not the student has taken the book out of context in a desperate attempt to get points back on a test question.

      I made an error on an exam I gave today. I told the students there would be no questions on septicemia on today's exam, because we haven't covered it in class yet (even though it's essentially shock, which we did cover and they were tested on today). I made the exam (which is in their computerized classroom Moodle) way before the semester started, and forgot to take those questions out and replace them when I had to make a last minute change in the schedule.

      So I told the students those questions would be thrown out when I did the item analysis, and if they got the questions right they'd get points added back into their score (this is college policy). One of the students made the snarky response, "I hope you do the analysis better than you did on the medication exam."

      She was referring to a question that the whole class had gotten right, but had been marked wrong due to a glitch in Moodle (we just had a software upgrade, and it was the first test I'd given under it--there's a STEEP learning curve from the old system). I had caught the error myself and made it right.

      I tell you, crap like that makes me want to not bother to tell the students when I make a mistake and let them eat the result. Fortunately for this girl, I'm ethical and would never do such a thing.

      But it's fun to think about.

      Quoth Ironclad Alibi View Post
      I'm making a note of all these dead white guy jokes on my Bradbury.
      I tell you, the dead white guy jokes have gone Mark Twain.
      They say that God only gives us what we can handle. Apparently, God thinks I'm a bad ass.

      Comment


      • #33
        Quoth Panacea View Post
        The spoken English as written English drives me nuts, even though I tell them repeatedly not to write this way.
        Writing the spoken English as written English is ONLY appropriate when writing dialogue in a work of fiction.

        I had to critique someone in a writing forum once, telling him "Your characters don't sound like real people. Listen to how people talk and write that."

        But for anything official and scholastic? Yeah, no. Proper grammar and everything.
        PWNADE(TM) - Serve up a glass today! | PWNZER - An act of pwnage so awesome, it's like the victim got hit by a tank.

        There are only Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because I choose to walk!

        Comment


        • #34
          Quoth Jay 2K Winger View Post
          Writing the spoken English as written English is ONLY appropriate when writing dialogue in a work of fiction.
          I once got marked down for my grammar in a section of dialogue. And when I spoke to the teacher, she stuck by it. >_<

          ^-.-^
          Faith is about what you do. It's about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It's about making sacrifices for the good of others. - Dresden

          Comment


          • #35
            Quoth Jay 2K Winger View Post
            Writing the spoken English as written English is ONLY appropriate when writing dialogue in a work of fiction.

            I had to critique someone in a writing forum once, telling him "Your characters don't sound like real people. Listen to how people talk and write that."

            But for anything official and scholastic? Yeah, no. Proper grammar and everything.
            Really, you should write dialog like "real people like to think they sound in everyday conversation". If you actually record real back-and-forth informal conversation, it's often almost painful to transcribe and nearly incomprehensible. Especially when talking to somebody you know well, there are many incomplete sentences, an immense amount of "verbal shorthand", and of course a lot of ums, ahs, and verbal circumlocutions.

            Written-out dialogue really has a unique style all by itself; it's neither formal language nor the way people actually talk. Its vocabulary is a mashup between spoken and written language, while the grammar is very near formal written grammar with a few shortcuts for expediency and "authenticity".

            Because this style is what people think they sound like when talking, we don't notice it when, say, watching a movie or TV show, despite the fact actual mere mortals don't actually talk like that very often.
            Last edited by sirwired; 09-20-2012, 03:51 PM.

            Comment


            • #36
              Quoth Panacea View Post
              I tell you, crap like that makes me want to not bother to tell the students when I make a mistake and let them eat the result. Fortunately for this girl, I'm ethical and would never do such a thing.

              But it's fun to think about.
              For real fun, remind the student directly that taunting the person who controls their grade is showing a distinct lack of self-preservation.

              Remember, you know you'd never do something like that, but the student doesn't.
              The Rich keep getting richer because they keep doing what it was that made them rich. Ditto the Poor.
              "Hy kan tell dey is schmot qvestions, dey is makink my head hurt."
              Hoc spatio locantur.

              Comment


              • #37
                Quoth Jay 2K Winger View Post

                I had to critique someone in a writing forum once, telling him "Your characters don't sound like real people. Listen to how people talk and write that."
                What makes me giggle about this, is that one time I wrote a character who spoke proper/grammatically correct English because of how she was raised. She was the only character in the short story who spoke like this. Yet half the students in my studio class, when critiquing, said that "All the characters spoke way too proper English."

                The professor facepalmed (not kidding) then asked everyone, "Are you sure it was all the characters, or just one in particular?"

                Classmates: Uuuhh... *quickly flipping through pages to skim all the dialog* Oh... I guess it was just that one character.

                Professor: I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that she did that on purpose.

                (After that I ignored half of what my classmates wrote to me because it was obvious they didn't bother reading the pieces and just spewed generic babble.)

                ~~Back on track!~~

                I'm slowly getting more and more disheartened by younger people's writing. I help my old Middle School English teacher from time and time, and what I see written on a paper is just eye-bleedingly terrible. I saw an entire paper written with internet shorthand (U instead of You, etc.) I saw one where the girl literally wrote the way she spoke.

                "So like, the book said that, like, this character, I think his name was Macbeth, was like, told by these old hags that--"

                I'm cringing just from the memory. Oh, and of course, I get all the stories about how the students demand to know what was wrong with their paper, followed by the parents demanding to know what the teacher was going to "do about it."

                Her answer? "Why don't you ask your son/daughter that question? I'm only a teacher, they have the EARN the grade."
                My Writing Blog -Updated 05/06/2013
                It's so I can get ideas out of my head, I decided to put it in a blog in case people are bored or are curious as to the (many) things in progress.

                Comment


                • #38
                  Quoth Miss Fatale View Post
                  I wish I could just say, "Because that's the grade you got."
                  As someone else suggested (which I was already going to say), you could very well say, "Because that's the grade you earned." And then, of course, explain why that was the grade they earned.

                  Quoth Irving Patrick Freleigh View Post
                  I was born at the wrong freaking time.

                  My parents never would've taken my side against the teacher in a dispute over grades. Never.
                  No, you were born at the RIGHT time, with the RIGHT parents, because it taught you personal accountability and personal responsibility, rather than that if you screw up, it's someone else's fault.

                  My sophomore year high school English teacher failed me, as I was a lazy little shit and didn't hand in all my assignments, every one of which I was fully capable of doing.

                  Years later I found out that she used me by name as an example of the good and bad a student could achieve: the bad because of the laziness, the good because, while I was lazy, I knew what I was doing, and actually scored a perfect verbal score on my PSAT (800 out of 800).

                  Quoth raudf View Post
                  From a parent perspective, if my kid is doing his level best and still failing, I will be having a chat with the teacher.. to find out how the heck we can help him.
                  My niece Dragon just started college (YAY!), and recently asked me to proofread one of her papers. I did, and I pointed out a few things that I thought could be improved, and why, but it literally took all of my willpower to not suggest specific phraseology for her conclusion, rather than what I did, which was to tell her the conclusion was awkward and should be reworked. (She reworked it, and it was much, much better.) I DID suggest a couple words here and there ("Ideally", not "idealistically", for example), but those were mostly careless errors on her part that she knew better than to make.

                  Quoth Panacea View Post
                  I made an error on an exam I gave today.

                  So I told the students those questions would be thrown out...
                  I still vividly remember an incident from my Microeconomics class in college (freshman year): after a test, we were going over the correct answers, and on one question, when I was certain the prof was wrong, I raised my hand (this was a lecture class with about 200-300 students, as I recall) and pointed out to the prof that the answer he had as correct was, in fact, incorrect, and the correct answer was the one I had used, and I backed up my point with the appropriate information. He stopped, took a look at what I was saying, and said something to the effect of "Whoops! He's right. Well, since I screwed up, to be fair to everyone, I'm going to everyone that question as correct." Many in the class gave me a very thankful look.

                  "The Customer Is Always Right...But The Bartender Decides Who Is
                  Still A Customer."

                  Comment


                  • #39
                    Quoth Jester View Post
                    He stopped, took a look at what I was saying, and said something to the effect of "Whoops! He's right. Well, since I screwed up, to be fair to everyone, I'm going to everyone that question as correct." Many in the class gave me a very thankful look.
                    See, this is how it should work. Teachers make mistakes, they admit them, and make it right.

                    Then you have teachers like my General Psychology teacher, who if one or two kids in the (COLLEGE) class said, "Oh, but I didn't understand the question," she'd immediately back down and go, "Oh, well I guess that's not fair so everyone gets points on that."

                    Pissed me off to no end. I ended up giving up and not bothering to pay attention or study in that class because saying, "Oh well the question was confusing" was enough to get the entire class credit on the question.
                    My Writing Blog -Updated 05/06/2013
                    It's so I can get ideas out of my head, I decided to put it in a blog in case people are bored or are curious as to the (many) things in progress.

                    Comment


                    • #40
                      I have to show you guys this.

                      I had people over Sunday, so I was preoccupied all day. Imagine my horror when I logged into my biology lab group's powerpoint presentation to find THIS HORROR:
                      https://docs.google.com/presentation...ksC_ZvrWw/edit

                      This is a low-level class, but it is college biology. We did not present that monstrosity. I made a different one that was actually readable.

                      Comment


                      • #41
                        Quoth sirwired View Post
                        Really, you should write dialog like "real people like to think they sound in everyday conversation". If you actually record real back-and-forth informal conversation, it's often almost painful to transcribe and nearly incomprehensible. Especially when talking to somebody you know well, there are many incomplete sentences, an immense amount of "verbal shorthand", and of course a lot of ums, ahs, and verbal circumlocutions.
                        Very good point. Much better put.
                        PWNADE(TM) - Serve up a glass today! | PWNZER - An act of pwnage so awesome, it's like the victim got hit by a tank.

                        There are only Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because I choose to walk!

                        Comment


                        • #42
                          Quoth manybellsdown View Post
                          Imagine my horror when I logged into my biology lab group's powerpoint presentation to find THIS HORROR:
                          https://docs.google.com/presentation...ksC_ZvrWw/edit
                          I particularly like how the 4th slide has the text just sort of dribble off the end of the border image. Although the sample image at the bottom of 5 is a close second, with the sample image on the last page right behind it, but at least it makes sense, unlike the one on 5.

                          ^-.-^
                          Faith is about what you do. It's about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It's about making sacrifices for the good of others. - Dresden

                          Comment


                          • #43
                            I had a paper that was worth a third of one of my year's credits and when I got it back I got a grade much lower than I had expected (still a B though!), but the reason I got annoyed was that the feedback I received was wrong. It stated that I had made claims that I had not, and had specifically out of my way to make clear I was not going to make.

                            Best thing was that it was a paper in my final year which meant I had no recourse to have anything adjusted. . . .

                            Comment

                            Working...
                            X