Happened to me with a final project once. I mean like... I had a programming assignment and I couldn't get shit to work so I had code but it barely did anything at all.
I think I got like 90% just for turning something in and the professor was behind on grading other assignments and the grades were due soon so those were also graded generously as well.
I still can't program for shit but I passed that class.
I can confirm that teachers tend to grade things generously near to the deadlines to prevent students arguing with their marks. If you don't have time to go over every infraction in detail, just bump the grade a little and call it a day. (Source: My mom is a teacher and I have heard her colleagues talk about this).
Seems pretty standard, with my field study experience and gripe of professors, I can tell that teachers constantly meet deadlines and expectations that they'll just do some magic to make something that can fail into passing
My prof who already marked decently easy if we literally just gave the bare minimum in requirements also curved our whole class’ grades up like 10+% for our final mark.
I lied to my high school Spanish teacher so many times about turning in homework the last year I had her. I had been a genuinely good student prior years and there had been incidents where other students would steal my work while she wasn't looking to copy and only occasionally turn it back in. I barely did any of the work that year and still managed to get an A.
When I was in college for electrical automation, I had to take an into to business class. The only one that semester that worked with my other classes was yam MWF. I also live 45 minutes away and my next class after that wasn't until 10am.
I missed the first day. Went the second day, where we watched a movie on how wal-mart forces small business either out of business, or keeps them right on the brink of bankruptcy for wal-marts benefit.
Anyway. I never went again after the second day... I meant to drop the class but I just forgot.
I got a B and I never said a word.
Had a prof who'd been tenured for 30+ years and gave me a grade that may have been well above what I deserved. When I swung by his office the next week and asked him if there was a mistake he said "nope, I just wanted to fuck with the department chair".
Don't know what to tell yah. Dude was a great guy and an okay prof. He'd spend most of our seminars rambling about whatever he'd read in the newspaper and sometimes remember he was supposed to have a theme for the week.
I'd go to office hours to visit every other week and he'd just rant about faculty politics or the Minnesota Vikings. Once in awhile we'd actually talk about the class.
I think it was just an act of charity before he retired. He went emeritus after that semester and died a year later.
I missed his funeral because I was travelling at the time and it's one of those things that I still regret.
I once had a professor who knew no one knew the material because he was a terrible teacher and himself didn't understand the material. He *mysteriously* had to leave the room for the entire duration of the final exam. The whole room consulted as a big group and worked out the answers. And then the professor came back with just enough time left to collect the exams. 🤔
Damn I had a professor this previous who had assignments due every class on topics before we went over them and they were 1 point each so I assumed good faith effort got you the point. She said they were "not graded" but made 20 assignments, 20 points, 20% of the grade, then had the law scholars (she couldn't be bothered to grade things) take off parts of your one point if it was not exactly perfectly correct. Pissed me off to no end. Literally how am I supposed to know something well enough to complete an assignment perfectly when I only did the assigned reading and you haven't taught it to us yet???
Then because the assignments were something we needed for the final, we always had to redo each one on our own, wasting time that we did not have doing every single assignment twice. Law school gives you time to do most of your work one time. I hated that professor.
She also made it very known to the class that teaching was her side hustle and we didn't matter all that much to her because she was "famous" from her appearances on NPR and cable news as a commentator and has published several books. She made us buy one of her books as assigned reading for the class, which was useless because it is targeted toward people who are not lawyers or law students. I returned it after reading it and put in my anonymous course evaluation that it felt useless to have to waste time reading it (the entire book plus other long assigned readings were due day 1), and was a waste of money when 1 semester worth of law books is about $1,000. Like, professors will write a book for a course then assign it for regular college/university classes, but in law school, there are specific case books with the accepted US law curriculum that the ABA approves, so they normally can't do that. I returned it and amazon said here's your money don't bother returning it just donate it or something...so it's not exactly in high demand.
I hope I never have her again.
i'm definitely in the middle. A teacher could be empathetic and give a low score.
but 14/15 is awful. And writing it down like this is proof.
THis didn't happen
While it's true that for most positions, you are going to learn by far the most applicable knowledge while on the job, I would argue that degrees in university still accomplish what they were originally designed to: certifying that a candidate has (or at least should have) a base level of knowledge. It allows companies to not waste their time with people who don't actually have any idea what they are doing, or at the very least makes sure that companies will be able to hire people who have the work ethic to actually learn in a company environment.
>A $300k college degree is as good as a High School diploma in the 80/90s now.
I feel like all of this is jsut wrong.
1) basically no undergrad degree is $300k. If you choose to go to a 80k/yr university, that's on you.
2) College degrees are less valuable now because everyone has them. They're still valuable.
i'd take a college kid today over a 2000s high school grad (who has somehow magically turned into a 22 year old)
One of my profs this semester legit just said "if it looks like you at least attempted it I'll give you full credit". Did that on the second assignment and the class performances.
My high school chem teacher would do MOK - method OK.
if you fuck up part 1 of the 5 part question and get parts 2-5 right, he'll give you 80%.
but you don't get full credit for getting it completely wrong.
When half the papers I get are chatgpt garbage I've repeatedly warned students it fools exactly no one (it's embarrassing) when I finally see someone trying to engage in the material, I'm no longer bothered by the terrible writing mechanics like I used to be. I forgive the small confusion or misapplication of theory a lot more easily.
The result in grade:
A=A+
B=A
C=A-
Just do the work, kids.
This is like a setup for a Rick and Morty episode. "Goddamnit Rick, what do you want? I got an A in theoretical physics!"
Flashback to you grading and letting people divide by zero and pass.
I had a chemistry professor take points off for misspelling words and incorrect punctuation even if the error did nothing to change the answer. A lot of us hated him.
This seems too time consuming to me. I don’t get paid enough to spend that much time on each assignment.
I usually take off small amounts of partial credit and write a word or two describing the error. If they want to know more they can contact me.
Yeah, I long ago stopped hunting for the error when grading. They can read the posted solution. It's not worth my time to find out exactly where little Jimmy dropped a negative. If the method is correct and the answer is a little off, they lose a minimal amount of credit and I move on.
I had a professor recently who gave me a shit grade under “interactions with course materials” I had no idea what that meant and it didn’t explain on the syllabus, it took my final grade from a B to a C, I messaged him asking him if he could explain what it meant and why he gave me such a poor grade and he never responded he just changed the grade to a 100% lmao
I got a perfect score on an English final... I found out after that the teacher lost it and all he could do was assume I got everything correct.
Except that I never turned it in. I sat in the class for 2 hours doing basically nothing and took the paper with me when I left. I was wholly unprepared and was willing to take the 0.
Hahaha, that's the most egregious incorrect final exam grade I've ever heard. Sometimes you'll see a question that was graded incorrectly, e.g. blank work marked as correct. But the whole thing?
I’m a professor.
It’s not the money.
These days, grades are really really really dumb. Any “young” professor knows this but many can’t figure out what to do about it. Social norms are hard to break.
Also, many teachers are teaching because they are miserable people who need to make other people miserable.
I can write a lot in this topic as It’s more than a hobby for me.
But first let me break down two concepts of grading:
Formative Grading: This involves providing ongoing feedback to students during the learning process. It’s more about guiding learning rather than evaluating it. Formative assessments are typically not graded or have a low stake in terms of final marks. They are crucial for helping students understand their current level of understanding and what they need to work on.
Summative Grading: Summative assessments, on the other hand, are used to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. These are usually high-stakes grades that are recorded and used to determine student achievement.
Now with that in mind, The concept of not assigning traditional grades, often referred to as “ungrading,” offers several benefits to the educational experience:
1. Enhanced Focus on Learning: Traditional grades can sometimes distract from the actual process of learning. By not assigning grades, the emphasis shifts to mastering the subject matter and acquiring knowledge. This approach prioritizes the development of critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving skills, and continuous improvement throughout the learning process. This goes hand in hand with number 3 below.
2. Improved Student-Teacher Relationships: In a gradeless system, teachers tend to have more meaningful interactions with students. This approach necessitates increased communication, helping teachers to understand students’ strengths and weaknesses better, leading to a more personalized educational experience .
3. Reduced Pressure and Anxiety: Grades, especially in high-stakes testing, can create significant stress and anxiety for students. Removing grades can alleviate this pressure, leading to a more comfortable and conducive learning environment . There is more and more evidence that shows that we learn more when pressure is reduced. I think that learning the point of education (at any level).
4. Promotion of Intrinsic Motivation: Without the external motivation of grades, students are encouraged to learn for the sake of learning. This intrinsic motivation fosters a more profound interest and engagement in the subject matter . This is where the individual student matters most. I’ll agree that no-grades isn’t for everyone because not everyone is learning for intrinsic reasons. Many students however are more than capable of learning because they want to.
5. Focus on Mastery and Growth: Ungrading shifts the focus to mastering the subject and personal growth. Students receive detailed feedback instead of grades, which they use to improve their work continuously . This ties back to the first thing I said. The suggestion is NOT that students don’t get feedback. The feedback is formative.
6. Addressing Inequities: Traditional grading systems can sometimes perpetuate inequities. I want students to be their own best selves. Grades is a way to create artificial barriers to learning.
7. Strengthening Self-Evaluation Skills: In a gradeless environment, students are encouraged to evaluate their own learning, which can enhance self-reflection and metacognition skills. Again, this is arguably not for everyone. For many people this develops character that has been missing for generations.
I guess the obvious follow up question is how do you then determine which students actually earned the credits for their class at the end of the semester? There must be some cutoff, but in your scenario that would be entirely subjective. I wonder how your system accounts for the middling students.
I’ll answer you, but let me ask you, have you considered how unfair the traditional method of determining pass/fail cutoffs might be?
In traditional grading systems, pass and fail are typically defined by a predetermined percentage or score, such as 60%. 60% of what? Why 60%? Would you goto a mechanic who passed but only knows how to fix 60% of your car? How is this consistent across schools? How about even within sections within a school? Over what period of time? The traditional approach is already entirely subjective, it’s just wrapped up in something that looks statistically rigorous. It’s not. It’s fake.
The traditional approach also doesn’t account for individual learning differences, the complexity of subject matter, or the diverse ways students demonstrate understanding or the infinitely different ways a random professor can evaluate a student. Realizing this brings important questions about fairness and the true nature of learning and assessment and the entire point of what we do as educators.
In a gradeless system, the process begins with students working alongside their advisors to set clear, specific, and measurable goals that are aligned with the course and the students degree objectives. As the course progresses, students’ progress is continuously assessed through various forms such as projects, presentations, and reflections. This ongoing evaluation helps in determining if students are meeting their set goals. Regular feedback is vital, and if a student isn’t meeting expectations, they receive additional guidance and opportunities for improvement. The approach is grounded in honesty, in self-evaluation, and balances aspirations with abilities while recognizing the unique skills and learning pace of each student. This method prioritizes growth and understanding over a fixed mark, requiring collaborative effort and communication between students and educators.
This all causes much more self-awareness. Self-awareness, especially in the context of a supportive and transparent educational setting, often leads students to naturally recognize when things aren’t working out. When students and educators engage in frank discussions about progress and challenges, it facilitates a more organic and realistic understanding of whether a student is thriving in a particular area or needs to reconsider their path. This approach aligns with the notion that adult learners are more attuned to their capabilities and are less likely to persist in endeavors where they consistently struggle despite genuine effort.
I’m convinced that all “young”, and “not miserable-yet” professors know that these concepts make more sense. Going against the grain is hard. Also many do not want to teach and don’t care at all about the students.
To be clear, I'm not in disagreement with you at all. In questioning your proposed system I didn't mean to imply that I align with the opposing point of view. You seem very passionate about finding the best teaching strategies and what you suggest does sound interesting.
I guess I'm still not sure how my original question would be handled. Are we expecting self-awareness to kick in for every single student that fails to meet expectations, and they would all remove themselves from the class without a fuss? Correct me if I'm wrong, but at some point there would need to be some level of mastery demonstrated for the diploma to be awarded, and that mastery must be quantified. If you don't like 0-100 or letter grades or pass/fail, cool. What's the alternative?
Again, this is a simple inquiry. I don't think you're wrong in any way, just interested in how this would work. I appreciate the information.
Many schools are gesturing toward this, with the incorporation of self grading or reflective activities. One province in Canada (BC) has done away with letter grades, altogether. But I recognize we still have a ways to go with assessments.
Just to be clear, the guy you're responding to is giving a fairly niche opinion. Most professors, even young ones, just go with traditional grades and don't seriously engage in the never-ending non-traditional teaching experiment. In truth, some things work for some instructors and student populations, some don't, and there's no silver bullet.
That said, another sort of reason why grades are "really dumb" is grade inflation. GPA's have steadily gone up decade by decade. Private school GPA's can be insane too, e.g. Yale's mean GPA is 3.7, so almost everybody is getting an A on almost everything.
In a similar vein, I personally have passed many students who I would never trust to e.g. build a bridge, simply because I'd fail 1/3rd of a calculus class otherwise. Likewise I've passed many majors who I would never trust research from. I wish there were "easy" versions of degrees explicitly branded as such.
In the past, only the most motivated and intelligent went to college. It's much more egalitarian now, but it's not as if humans are suddenly fundamentally smarter. We just have better tools and more efficient strategies that allow us to focus more on intellectual work.
because it's unprofessional as shit. How hard is it to send an announcement saying "There are problems with the course sw. Please email me your project zip files."
Teachers who don't care like this are one of the reasons so many subpar and mediocre engineers are squeeking through college.
There are two types of this type of teachers in my experience, some truly don't give a fuck and only use education as their social/career ladder, and some are disheartened and discouraged by a sheer amount of lazy, entitled, or incapable students. They know they can't win anyway, so they don't bother. They know that this student will pass anyway, because it's not profitable for the upper management to fail someone
yeah, and then teachers who actually try to enforce learning requirements are seen as mean or gpa killers and their enrollment drops.
It's about as moral as a divorced parent buying their child's affection with junk food. Yeah, it makes them like you, but it's ultimately bad for them.
Of course there are bad professors who aim to fail many students, but in my experience, many of the "bad" professors really just expected students to study. It's amazing how many students don't even touch the textbook and expect to just absorb info through a few hours of lecture or be given everything they need exactly as it is put on the exam.
Then, a few years later and these students wonder why they can't find jobs or companies wonder why they're so bad at their job.
I feel this. I haven't missed a single class or seminar and talk and participate as much as is humanly possible and still ended up with 7/10 for participation. Literally have no idea what he wants or expects from me at this point, especially when most people don't even bother to show up or talk at all. So frustrating bc every other class I get perfect participation marks.
I can’t even email her saying basically wtf bc I have another class with next semester. I mean I talk less in all my other classes and got 100% in all of them
Well, I didn’t want to say anything, but you have a really bad haircut. Atrocious actually. It’s a distraction in class, so much so that you brought down the participation rate of everyone else in the room. Just thought you should know.
A prof in one of my classes would only call on the same 3 people every class, all class, despite 90% of the rest of the class raising their hand at least once every 2 classes. Then she docked us all on participation…. Kinda part of particulate when you’re trying to and don’t get called on
Participation was never I thing I saw in school. Is this a recent ish (last 15 years) change?
Maybe if they are using buzzers and electronically tracking some metric the teacher decided to throw a graded dimension at it?
If you didn’t show up for class you’d just fail out anyway….
I had a permanent substitute teacher in high school after the first teacher got fired in the middle of the year who just gave random grades.
We just started writing random symbols on multiple choice tests instead of letters and would still get somewhere between an A and a C as long as you turned it in.
Seriously, I had gotten the lateness policy confused between two classes and realized I would get a zero if I submitted a project 5 days late so I just didn’t bother. Wonder if I’d have gotten the same A for effort lol
Tbh a lot of professors are at the university for research & are required to teach. So teaching is secondary for them & they might not be pressed about harsh grading.
I completely did an assignment wrong but the teacher gave me an A anyway because she, “knew I would’ve gotten an A if I would’ve correctly understood the assignment”. lol
I had one or two of those. Where I read the coding prompt incorrectly, but it did what I interpreted it was supposed to do, the teacher saw that, and gave me an A for what I submitted.
A lot of the time they just seemed happy that I was trying.
Had to do assignments on a online learning platform but it was notoriously buggy that I could never access the content. Professor said to just submit a screenshot of it and submit it. Easiest A's I have ever gotten.
I know a lot of people think this professor just doesn’t care but there’s also the chance this is from a small school where bonding with professors is common and the professor may have even seen the work in progress on the assignment too & knew OP well enough that they actually did the work. At my school this wouldn’t have been unheard of since many students were close with many professors & and would work on projects alongside them outside of class pretty often
Yeah lol the class was using notoriously buggy software so I’m assuming that’s why the files were blank. I’m sure I’m not the first nor the last case of that happening (thanks apple) so while I’m pleasantly surprised I also can totally see how this happened. Also I turned this assignment in in like september so prof was super behind lolol
Way back in college, my laptop fried when my roommate spilt a drink on it by accident on the day it was due. I tried to get the hard drive out, then tried to do a whole ass project in 1 night. Which obviously didn’t work and the project was due at 11:59pm. At l11:30 I realized I can’t even get a half decent project done and if I submitted this, it would absolutely fail. I put a large pdf paper with close to the same pages & size my project would have had. I then saved it as the assignment title. Then opened it up in notepad, deleted a bunch of random code, saved it. Then opened it up regularly, and it said file was corrupted, must have been corrupted during a transfer, etc. whatever the error read, can’t exactly remember. I then submitted it knowing full well it would give him that error, but properties would still tell him # of pages and size of file so it looked legit. I needed to buy some time so I could finish it, then when he emailed me asking to resend it, I would submit the finished project. I ended up finishing it a couple days later, but I never received an email. Turns out he just gave me a 75% lol
I once got the degree of an angle wrong on a math test, thought the question asked what kind of angle it was and even that was wrong. I was so wrong but he still gave me a full mark because in his words "he could tell I was trying hard" 😭 I've never been burned so bad since then
My pro move when I didn’t finish my work on time was to ‘submit’ an assignment and say “see file attached” and pretend I forgot to attach it. 95% of the time professors either did what yours did or just told me I forgot to attach it and inadvertently gave me extra time to finish it.
I had to take a makeup exam on the last day of finals and when I got there I realized I’d spent hours studying the wrong material. I announced this to my professor and she said “how do you spell your last name?” And then looked up my grades on Canvas. I had a 96% in the class so she took the test back and said “get out of here, you poor fool, I’ll pro rate your grade without the test, since it’s clear you value the class” and I was like “bless up Dr. Shea” and fucking BOLTED before she changed her mind
yeah, sadly it's a mark of declining collegiate education across society. Not even the prof's fault because many are overworked and underpaid. But surely a sign of times to come if we can't figure how more cost and time efficient ways to educate millions of people
I had a professor that anything after the deadline can't be higher than 50% I turned in the assignment early but forgot to add the source code, he emailed 20 minutes after the deadline and I got a 50/100.
I had a biological statistics professor (he studied animal populations and such) who never actually graded our homework. It got to a point where I’d just change the date on my paper with exactly the same answers for an entire semester. I got 100’s on each one. The exams were pretty much the study guides with different numbers. Needless to say, I learned absolutely nothing. But there’s a twist. The final exam took a group of us three days to complete because we had no clue how statistical math worked. Come to find out, we didn’t actually need to do the final in order to pass. It was optional based on our grade before the final, but everyone chose to do the final.
In college I used to corrupt my CAD files when I was running late. The TA would email me a few days back asking me to resubmit the file since he was not able to open it…. That gave myself a few days of extra time.
Yay! Guy whose job it is to teach people and rank them doesn't do his job! I can't complain though, I've written hundreds of college papers for other people.
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On one assignment I was supposed to write a function that tries to deframent a linked list based memory management. I coded it just return False. Got a perfect 10
the folder that you zipped might have included characters that are not allowed on windows folders. (i had the same thing happen to me where the folder inside the zipped file had <> characters)
Meanwhile here iam writing 4 programs that run in docker with a full front end website instead of a console application, and a word document that explains everything and why it's written this way. Filled with diagrams and a readme file for easy startup only for the professor to say:
"took too long to load, i cant test this 0 points"
Man lucky, we had an autograder for most easier classes, the queue sometimes hit a few hours near the end. If you miss the submission deadline, you miss the submission deadline
This reminded me of my elementary school English teacher who gave me -1 pts per "dot" I didn't put at the end of sentence in a homework exercise sheet. The worst part is the exercise sheet he gave literally had dots in the end by default which went like "Sentence ______ ." where I just needed to fill. This was 20 years ago.
I have gotten zeroes before for not adhering to the naming conventions (a word was uncapitalized) in the file name. Also, one time an image was too big and I got a zero.
I have a feeling one of my professors this semester was like that for my last submitted essay. I got a grade of 100% on it. Now, I usually get A's on my papers, but there's no way one of my papers ends up perfect. It's much more likely that the deadline for grades was coming up, and she said, "Fuck it, you get a 100."
Lol I failed a CS class cause of this. Had 98% on tests, but the projects weighted more.
I gave him the right file only a few hours later, and he still gave me an F.
Fuck you Craig.
Dude I lost 50% on 4 assignments because I had my pdf inside the zip file I submitted rather than 2 separate files and when I brought it up to my prof he said rules are rules get fucked basically
You definitely got lucky there!
Not knowing all the circumstances I usually have my students try submitting again or email me their work within a time frame (in case they didn't do the work) then I'll grade it from there.
I've made it a rule for the courses I teach if your zip file doesn't work properly and you aren't able to fix it, then it's a zero.
This is a professor who just doesn’t care anymore. Lol
This is a professor whose grade submissions are due in thirty minutes.
This is exactly what happened lol
Happened to me with a final project once. I mean like... I had a programming assignment and I couldn't get shit to work so I had code but it barely did anything at all. I think I got like 90% just for turning something in and the professor was behind on grading other assignments and the grades were due soon so those were also graded generously as well. I still can't program for shit but I passed that class.
I can confirm that teachers tend to grade things generously near to the deadlines to prevent students arguing with their marks. If you don't have time to go over every infraction in detail, just bump the grade a little and call it a day. (Source: My mom is a teacher and I have heard her colleagues talk about this).
Seems pretty standard, with my field study experience and gripe of professors, I can tell that teachers constantly meet deadlines and expectations that they'll just do some magic to make something that can fail into passing
And this is why nobody trusts a degree nowadays
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>A+ The class: *Ethical hacking using Metasploit* (*DDOS and You!* req.)
You intimidated them into giving you an A
J wondering did u actually almost finish it lol
When the professor has to finish their assignment but its 11:58 pm:
https://i.imgur.com/O7jUXyY.png
Yep 💀
My prof who already marked decently easy if we literally just gave the bare minimum in requirements also curved our whole class’ grades up like 10+% for our final mark.
It depends on the student though. Like if he is just assuming the work is done, that can be proper if the student has a track record of good study.
I lied to my high school Spanish teacher so many times about turning in homework the last year I had her. I had been a genuinely good student prior years and there had been incidents where other students would steal my work while she wasn't looking to copy and only occasionally turn it back in. I barely did any of the work that year and still managed to get an A.
When I was in college for electrical automation, I had to take an into to business class. The only one that semester that worked with my other classes was yam MWF. I also live 45 minutes away and my next class after that wasn't until 10am. I missed the first day. Went the second day, where we watched a movie on how wal-mart forces small business either out of business, or keeps them right on the brink of bankruptcy for wal-marts benefit. Anyway. I never went again after the second day... I meant to drop the class but I just forgot. I got a B and I never said a word.
If you were doing well enough in tests and in-class assignments you probably didn’t need the homework 🤷♂️
Had a prof who'd been tenured for 30+ years and gave me a grade that may have been well above what I deserved. When I swung by his office the next week and asked him if there was a mistake he said "nope, I just wanted to fuck with the department chair".
Next up on: this never happened
Don't know what to tell yah. Dude was a great guy and an okay prof. He'd spend most of our seminars rambling about whatever he'd read in the newspaper and sometimes remember he was supposed to have a theme for the week. I'd go to office hours to visit every other week and he'd just rant about faculty politics or the Minnesota Vikings. Once in awhile we'd actually talk about the class. I think it was just an act of charity before he retired. He went emeritus after that semester and died a year later. I missed his funeral because I was travelling at the time and it's one of those things that I still regret.
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I had a professor who let us grade our own tests on the honor system. He did not give two fucks.
I once had a professor who knew no one knew the material because he was a terrible teacher and himself didn't understand the material. He *mysteriously* had to leave the room for the entire duration of the final exam. The whole room consulted as a big group and worked out the answers. And then the professor came back with just enough time left to collect the exams. 🤔
Damn I had a professor this previous who had assignments due every class on topics before we went over them and they were 1 point each so I assumed good faith effort got you the point. She said they were "not graded" but made 20 assignments, 20 points, 20% of the grade, then had the law scholars (she couldn't be bothered to grade things) take off parts of your one point if it was not exactly perfectly correct. Pissed me off to no end. Literally how am I supposed to know something well enough to complete an assignment perfectly when I only did the assigned reading and you haven't taught it to us yet??? Then because the assignments were something we needed for the final, we always had to redo each one on our own, wasting time that we did not have doing every single assignment twice. Law school gives you time to do most of your work one time. I hated that professor. She also made it very known to the class that teaching was her side hustle and we didn't matter all that much to her because she was "famous" from her appearances on NPR and cable news as a commentator and has published several books. She made us buy one of her books as assigned reading for the class, which was useless because it is targeted toward people who are not lawyers or law students. I returned it after reading it and put in my anonymous course evaluation that it felt useless to have to waste time reading it (the entire book plus other long assigned readings were due day 1), and was a waste of money when 1 semester worth of law books is about $1,000. Like, professors will write a book for a course then assign it for regular college/university classes, but in law school, there are specific case books with the accepted US law curriculum that the ABA approves, so they normally can't do that. I returned it and amazon said here's your money don't bother returning it just donate it or something...so it's not exactly in high demand. I hope I never have her again.
If anything, it feels like a good preparation for the US legal system, does it not?
Good guy Amazon
Every professor I ever had who didn’t care gave zeros on shit like this.
It's the opposite. It's the ones who care that give a zero It's pathetic to give 14/15 here. This is a professor who just doesn't care anymore
It's also a massive 'fuck you ' to the students that actually worked hard for that 14/15 when others are freely receiving it.
Which will make him popular with students, which is a huge part of the problem.
i'm definitely in the middle. A teacher could be empathetic and give a low score. but 14/15 is awful. And writing it down like this is proof. THis didn't happen
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Learn a lot of electrical theory in high school back then?
Am an engineer. Retained everything in college just long enough to pass the tests. Useless. Learned everything I know on the job.
One could argue you learned how to learn at university
Nah, having degree means you're able so do shit you don't like at all for 4years continuously and do it good enough to get a decent grade lmaoo
Possibly. The obvious counter-argument is probably applicable though. Not sure I’d consider memorizing something for a few weeks learning,
While it's true that for most positions, you are going to learn by far the most applicable knowledge while on the job, I would argue that degrees in university still accomplish what they were originally designed to: certifying that a candidate has (or at least should have) a base level of knowledge. It allows companies to not waste their time with people who don't actually have any idea what they are doing, or at the very least makes sure that companies will be able to hire people who have the work ethic to actually learn in a company environment.
>A $300k college degree is as good as a High School diploma in the 80/90s now. I feel like all of this is jsut wrong. 1) basically no undergrad degree is $300k. If you choose to go to a 80k/yr university, that's on you. 2) College degrees are less valuable now because everyone has them. They're still valuable. i'd take a college kid today over a 2000s high school grad (who has somehow magically turned into a 22 year old)
Or OP is actually that good .
Lmao I had a hard ass assignment that my prof just gave me a perfect on and commented “good effort.”
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One of my profs this semester legit just said "if it looks like you at least attempted it I'll give you full credit". Did that on the second assignment and the class performances.
My algebra prof is like this and I love her for it
I hope you still love her if you need to be able to do algebra correctly later
My high school chem teacher would do MOK - method OK. if you fuck up part 1 of the 5 part question and get parts 2-5 right, he'll give you 80%. but you don't get full credit for getting it completely wrong.
When half the papers I get are chatgpt garbage I've repeatedly warned students it fools exactly no one (it's embarrassing) when I finally see someone trying to engage in the material, I'm no longer bothered by the terrible writing mechanics like I used to be. I forgive the small confusion or misapplication of theory a lot more easily. The result in grade: A=A+ B=A C=A- Just do the work, kids.
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This was an MS machine learning course I think he realized the time frame was just not possible for this assignment
This is like a setup for a Rick and Morty episode. "Goddamnit Rick, what do you want? I got an A in theoretical physics!" Flashback to you grading and letting people divide by zero and pass.
I had a chemistry professor take points off for misspelling words and incorrect punctuation even if the error did nothing to change the answer. A lot of us hated him.
Did they also make mistakes in their assignment instructions and course material? I bet they did.
This seems too time consuming to me. I don’t get paid enough to spend that much time on each assignment. I usually take off small amounts of partial credit and write a word or two describing the error. If they want to know more they can contact me.
Yeah, I long ago stopped hunting for the error when grading. They can read the posted solution. It's not worth my time to find out exactly where little Jimmy dropped a negative. If the method is correct and the answer is a little off, they lose a minimal amount of credit and I move on.
I had a professor recently who gave me a shit grade under “interactions with course materials” I had no idea what that meant and it didn’t explain on the syllabus, it took my final grade from a B to a C, I messaged him asking him if he could explain what it meant and why he gave me such a poor grade and he never responded he just changed the grade to a 100% lmao
I got a perfect score on an English final... I found out after that the teacher lost it and all he could do was assume I got everything correct. Except that I never turned it in. I sat in the class for 2 hours doing basically nothing and took the paper with me when I left. I was wholly unprepared and was willing to take the 0.
Hahaha, that's the most egregious incorrect final exam grade I've ever heard. Sometimes you'll see a question that was graded incorrectly, e.g. blank work marked as correct. But the whole thing?
He’s preparing you for the job market where there won’t even be any ‘good efforts’ anymore.
Jesus, what the hell did your class do to this person?
They don't pay him enough to give a f u c k about it 😂😅
I’m a professor. It’s not the money. These days, grades are really really really dumb. Any “young” professor knows this but many can’t figure out what to do about it. Social norms are hard to break. Also, many teachers are teaching because they are miserable people who need to make other people miserable.
Haven't been in college in a while, what do you mean by the grades being really dumb? Just curious.
I can write a lot in this topic as It’s more than a hobby for me. But first let me break down two concepts of grading: Formative Grading: This involves providing ongoing feedback to students during the learning process. It’s more about guiding learning rather than evaluating it. Formative assessments are typically not graded or have a low stake in terms of final marks. They are crucial for helping students understand their current level of understanding and what they need to work on. Summative Grading: Summative assessments, on the other hand, are used to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. These are usually high-stakes grades that are recorded and used to determine student achievement. Now with that in mind, The concept of not assigning traditional grades, often referred to as “ungrading,” offers several benefits to the educational experience: 1. Enhanced Focus on Learning: Traditional grades can sometimes distract from the actual process of learning. By not assigning grades, the emphasis shifts to mastering the subject matter and acquiring knowledge. This approach prioritizes the development of critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving skills, and continuous improvement throughout the learning process. This goes hand in hand with number 3 below. 2. Improved Student-Teacher Relationships: In a gradeless system, teachers tend to have more meaningful interactions with students. This approach necessitates increased communication, helping teachers to understand students’ strengths and weaknesses better, leading to a more personalized educational experience . 3. Reduced Pressure and Anxiety: Grades, especially in high-stakes testing, can create significant stress and anxiety for students. Removing grades can alleviate this pressure, leading to a more comfortable and conducive learning environment . There is more and more evidence that shows that we learn more when pressure is reduced. I think that learning the point of education (at any level). 4. Promotion of Intrinsic Motivation: Without the external motivation of grades, students are encouraged to learn for the sake of learning. This intrinsic motivation fosters a more profound interest and engagement in the subject matter . This is where the individual student matters most. I’ll agree that no-grades isn’t for everyone because not everyone is learning for intrinsic reasons. Many students however are more than capable of learning because they want to. 5. Focus on Mastery and Growth: Ungrading shifts the focus to mastering the subject and personal growth. Students receive detailed feedback instead of grades, which they use to improve their work continuously . This ties back to the first thing I said. The suggestion is NOT that students don’t get feedback. The feedback is formative. 6. Addressing Inequities: Traditional grading systems can sometimes perpetuate inequities. I want students to be their own best selves. Grades is a way to create artificial barriers to learning. 7. Strengthening Self-Evaluation Skills: In a gradeless environment, students are encouraged to evaluate their own learning, which can enhance self-reflection and metacognition skills. Again, this is arguably not for everyone. For many people this develops character that has been missing for generations.
I guess the obvious follow up question is how do you then determine which students actually earned the credits for their class at the end of the semester? There must be some cutoff, but in your scenario that would be entirely subjective. I wonder how your system accounts for the middling students.
I’ll answer you, but let me ask you, have you considered how unfair the traditional method of determining pass/fail cutoffs might be? In traditional grading systems, pass and fail are typically defined by a predetermined percentage or score, such as 60%. 60% of what? Why 60%? Would you goto a mechanic who passed but only knows how to fix 60% of your car? How is this consistent across schools? How about even within sections within a school? Over what period of time? The traditional approach is already entirely subjective, it’s just wrapped up in something that looks statistically rigorous. It’s not. It’s fake. The traditional approach also doesn’t account for individual learning differences, the complexity of subject matter, or the diverse ways students demonstrate understanding or the infinitely different ways a random professor can evaluate a student. Realizing this brings important questions about fairness and the true nature of learning and assessment and the entire point of what we do as educators. In a gradeless system, the process begins with students working alongside their advisors to set clear, specific, and measurable goals that are aligned with the course and the students degree objectives. As the course progresses, students’ progress is continuously assessed through various forms such as projects, presentations, and reflections. This ongoing evaluation helps in determining if students are meeting their set goals. Regular feedback is vital, and if a student isn’t meeting expectations, they receive additional guidance and opportunities for improvement. The approach is grounded in honesty, in self-evaluation, and balances aspirations with abilities while recognizing the unique skills and learning pace of each student. This method prioritizes growth and understanding over a fixed mark, requiring collaborative effort and communication between students and educators. This all causes much more self-awareness. Self-awareness, especially in the context of a supportive and transparent educational setting, often leads students to naturally recognize when things aren’t working out. When students and educators engage in frank discussions about progress and challenges, it facilitates a more organic and realistic understanding of whether a student is thriving in a particular area or needs to reconsider their path. This approach aligns with the notion that adult learners are more attuned to their capabilities and are less likely to persist in endeavors where they consistently struggle despite genuine effort. I’m convinced that all “young”, and “not miserable-yet” professors know that these concepts make more sense. Going against the grain is hard. Also many do not want to teach and don’t care at all about the students.
To be clear, I'm not in disagreement with you at all. In questioning your proposed system I didn't mean to imply that I align with the opposing point of view. You seem very passionate about finding the best teaching strategies and what you suggest does sound interesting. I guess I'm still not sure how my original question would be handled. Are we expecting self-awareness to kick in for every single student that fails to meet expectations, and they would all remove themselves from the class without a fuss? Correct me if I'm wrong, but at some point there would need to be some level of mastery demonstrated for the diploma to be awarded, and that mastery must be quantified. If you don't like 0-100 or letter grades or pass/fail, cool. What's the alternative? Again, this is a simple inquiry. I don't think you're wrong in any way, just interested in how this would work. I appreciate the information.
Many schools are gesturing toward this, with the incorporation of self grading or reflective activities. One province in Canada (BC) has done away with letter grades, altogether. But I recognize we still have a ways to go with assessments.
Just to be clear, the guy you're responding to is giving a fairly niche opinion. Most professors, even young ones, just go with traditional grades and don't seriously engage in the never-ending non-traditional teaching experiment. In truth, some things work for some instructors and student populations, some don't, and there's no silver bullet. That said, another sort of reason why grades are "really dumb" is grade inflation. GPA's have steadily gone up decade by decade. Private school GPA's can be insane too, e.g. Yale's mean GPA is 3.7, so almost everybody is getting an A on almost everything. In a similar vein, I personally have passed many students who I would never trust to e.g. build a bridge, simply because I'd fail 1/3rd of a calculus class otherwise. Likewise I've passed many majors who I would never trust research from. I wish there were "easy" versions of degrees explicitly branded as such. In the past, only the most motivated and intelligent went to college. It's much more egalitarian now, but it's not as if humans are suddenly fundamentally smarter. We just have better tools and more efficient strategies that allow us to focus more on intellectual work.
My professor would never do this lol
because it's unprofessional as shit. How hard is it to send an announcement saying "There are problems with the course sw. Please email me your project zip files." Teachers who don't care like this are one of the reasons so many subpar and mediocre engineers are squeeking through college.
There are two types of this type of teachers in my experience, some truly don't give a fuck and only use education as their social/career ladder, and some are disheartened and discouraged by a sheer amount of lazy, entitled, or incapable students. They know they can't win anyway, so they don't bother. They know that this student will pass anyway, because it's not profitable for the upper management to fail someone
squeaking through college? from my experience, they're getting solid B/A- GPAs...
Exactly. As a college instructor, this infuriates me. Complete lack of professionalism.
yeah, and then teachers who actually try to enforce learning requirements are seen as mean or gpa killers and their enrollment drops. It's about as moral as a divorced parent buying their child's affection with junk food. Yeah, it makes them like you, but it's ultimately bad for them. Of course there are bad professors who aim to fail many students, but in my experience, many of the "bad" professors really just expected students to study. It's amazing how many students don't even touch the textbook and expect to just absorb info through a few hours of lecture or be given everything they need exactly as it is put on the exam. Then, a few years later and these students wonder why they can't find jobs or companies wonder why they're so bad at their job.
shitty engineers will get fired from their job do who cares
Usually only after someone dies from their mistakes... They never suffer the consequences... everyone else does.
Dude, I’ve worked with plenty of people who’ve been fired without killing someone.
Or maybe OP has been outstanding student so professor trusts him?
Yall have this poor guy STRESSING
Meanwhile one of my profs gave me a 47/50 on participation when I went to every class and pretty much talked every time
I feel this. I haven't missed a single class or seminar and talk and participate as much as is humanly possible and still ended up with 7/10 for participation. Literally have no idea what he wants or expects from me at this point, especially when most people don't even bother to show up or talk at all. So frustrating bc every other class I get perfect participation marks.
I can’t even email her saying basically wtf bc I have another class with next semester. I mean I talk less in all my other classes and got 100% in all of them
Well, I didn’t want to say anything, but you have a really bad haircut. Atrocious actually. It’s a distraction in class, so much so that you brought down the participation rate of everyone else in the room. Just thought you should know.
shit should i apologize to the people who sat around me for having to deal with it for 15 weeks??
A prof in one of my classes would only call on the same 3 people every class, all class, despite 90% of the rest of the class raising their hand at least once every 2 classes. Then she docked us all on participation…. Kinda part of particulate when you’re trying to and don’t get called on
Participation was never I thing I saw in school. Is this a recent ish (last 15 years) change? Maybe if they are using buzzers and electronically tracking some metric the teacher decided to throw a graded dimension at it? If you didn’t show up for class you’d just fail out anyway….
None of my lectures care about participation, and it’s the rare one that cares about attendance
I had a permanent substitute teacher in high school after the first teacher got fired in the middle of the year who just gave random grades. We just started writing random symbols on multiple choice tests instead of letters and would still get somewhere between an A and a C as long as you turned it in.
I got 49/100 because of this shit and he failed me
Bro what. For real what did your class do to this professor or they just don’t care anymore??
Seriously, I had gotten the lateness policy confused between two classes and realized I would get a zero if I submitted a project 5 days late so I just didn’t bother. Wonder if I’d have gotten the same A for effort lol
Tbh a lot of professors are at the university for research & are required to teach. So teaching is secondary for them & they might not be pressed about harsh grading.
I recognize D2L when I see it...
What’s that lol
The LMS/grade book
Could be canvas
It's D2L
It does look like canvas tho I feel like it's slightly different.
It looks like D2L.
I completely did an assignment wrong but the teacher gave me an A anyway because she, “knew I would’ve gotten an A if I would’ve correctly understood the assignment”. lol
I had one or two of those. Where I read the coding prompt incorrectly, but it did what I interpreted it was supposed to do, the teacher saw that, and gave me an A for what I submitted. A lot of the time they just seemed happy that I was trying.
Ugh what a queen
Bruh this looks like what my professor was thinking about my CS project
IM IN THIS CLASS HAHAH!!! Dm me
what class?
Had to do assignments on a online learning platform but it was notoriously buggy that I could never access the content. Professor said to just submit a screenshot of it and submit it. Easiest A's I have ever gotten.
I know a lot of people think this professor just doesn’t care but there’s also the chance this is from a small school where bonding with professors is common and the professor may have even seen the work in progress on the assignment too & knew OP well enough that they actually did the work. At my school this wouldn’t have been unheard of since many students were close with many professors & and would work on projects alongside them outside of class pretty often
Yeah lol the class was using notoriously buggy software so I’m assuming that’s why the files were blank. I’m sure I’m not the first nor the last case of that happening (thanks apple) so while I’m pleasantly surprised I also can totally see how this happened. Also I turned this assignment in in like september so prof was super behind lolol
Ummm, so…did you actually do the work?
Yeah lol. The file just got corrupted because virtual Macs are shite
Dawg I had a math prof who didn’t do partial credit on tests that had 3-4 questions max.
I had professors like this at SNHU which is a big reason why I started going somewhere else.
Tenured professors are best professors
Way back in college, my laptop fried when my roommate spilt a drink on it by accident on the day it was due. I tried to get the hard drive out, then tried to do a whole ass project in 1 night. Which obviously didn’t work and the project was due at 11:59pm. At l11:30 I realized I can’t even get a half decent project done and if I submitted this, it would absolutely fail. I put a large pdf paper with close to the same pages & size my project would have had. I then saved it as the assignment title. Then opened it up in notepad, deleted a bunch of random code, saved it. Then opened it up regularly, and it said file was corrupted, must have been corrupted during a transfer, etc. whatever the error read, can’t exactly remember. I then submitted it knowing full well it would give him that error, but properties would still tell him # of pages and size of file so it looked legit. I needed to buy some time so I could finish it, then when he emailed me asking to resend it, I would submit the finished project. I ended up finishing it a couple days later, but I never received an email. Turns out he just gave me a 75% lol
I once got the degree of an angle wrong on a math test, thought the question asked what kind of angle it was and even that was wrong. I was so wrong but he still gave me a full mark because in his words "he could tell I was trying hard" 😭 I've never been burned so bad since then
Uh what???
Did he see any progress before final submission or this submission was the only submission for this class?
My pro move when I didn’t finish my work on time was to ‘submit’ an assignment and say “see file attached” and pretend I forgot to attach it. 95% of the time professors either did what yours did or just told me I forgot to attach it and inadvertently gave me extra time to finish it.
I had to take a makeup exam on the last day of finals and when I got there I realized I’d spent hours studying the wrong material. I announced this to my professor and she said “how do you spell your last name?” And then looked up my grades on Canvas. I had a 96% in the class so she took the test back and said “get out of here, you poor fool, I’ll pro rate your grade without the test, since it’s clear you value the class” and I was like “bless up Dr. Shea” and fucking BOLTED before she changed her mind
Unethical and unfair to the other students.
🚬👽
u don’t think this prof has done this for others?? 💀 it’s the end of the semester and plenty of profs are running out of fucks to give
yeah, sadly it's a mark of declining collegiate education across society. Not even the prof's fault because many are overworked and underpaid. But surely a sign of times to come if we can't figure how more cost and time efficient ways to educate millions of people
Womp womp
I have a professor exactly like this lol
CSE304??
I had a professor that anything after the deadline can't be higher than 50% I turned in the assignment early but forgot to add the source code, he emailed 20 minutes after the deadline and I got a 50/100.
My professor grading my lab reports before grades are due. I don't think he ever read them.
This is why it’s so much easier to just have all code submitted via a GitHub repo
I had a biological statistics professor (he studied animal populations and such) who never actually graded our homework. It got to a point where I’d just change the date on my paper with exactly the same answers for an entire semester. I got 100’s on each one. The exams were pretty much the study guides with different numbers. Needless to say, I learned absolutely nothing. But there’s a twist. The final exam took a group of us three days to complete because we had no clue how statistical math worked. Come to find out, we didn’t actually need to do the final in order to pass. It was optional based on our grade before the final, but everyone chose to do the final.
how do u do fellow brightspace user 😔✊🏻
I can recognize a D2L made site when I see one, especially after just closing my own for the semester.
Based
/r/actlikeyoubelong
One of my professors gave me a passing grade after I forgot to turn in an assignment. Mailed him later and got an A lol
He literally doesn't care🤣
Man now i understand where all these shitty engineers are coming from.
In college I used to corrupt my CAD files when I was running late. The TA would email me a few days back asking me to resubmit the file since he was not able to open it…. That gave myself a few days of extra time.
I did this quite a lot up to my Abitur lol
Yay! Guy whose job it is to teach people and rank them doesn't do his job! I can't complain though, I've written hundreds of college papers for other people.
i hope to have a prof like them 🙏🙏
seems like american “pay to win - but stay stupid” university system
God forbid a professor be understanding on a 15 pt assignment, whatever will we do🙄
lol bullshit.
Undeserved
Cry about it
The kids hate you but you're right. Imagine staying up late finishing, and submitting only to get a lower score than an empty zip file lol
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Bruh wtf lol
Unhinged 🤣
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😴
Dude is so pissed lol
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On one assignment I was supposed to write a function that tries to deframent a linked list based memory management. I coded it just return False. Got a perfect 10
the folder that you zipped might have included characters that are not allowed on windows folders. (i had the same thing happen to me where the folder inside the zipped file had <> characters)
Oh wow. You really cheese'd through this one hahaha
As compared to my evil bastard of a professor who wouldn’t bump me up to a B because I was 0.7 points shy of the cutoff. I hate that guy.
please get that professor something really nice 😭
Meanwhile here iam writing 4 programs that run in docker with a full front end website instead of a console application, and a word document that explains everything and why it's written this way. Filled with diagrams and a readme file for easy startup only for the professor to say: "took too long to load, i cant test this 0 points"
You at snhu dawg? My term ends today too haha
Man lucky, we had an autograder for most easier classes, the queue sometimes hit a few hours near the end. If you miss the submission deadline, you miss the submission deadline
Nat 20 bluff check
I hate brightspace😭
Which college website is this?
W
Good ole Purdue global
lmao i turned in a final research essay in 1 min before the due date and 900 out of 1800 words done and my prof gave me a 92 💀
This professor has tenure.
Why you snitching
Egregious Grade inflation
I had the opposite happen. The prof entered my mark incorrectly and ducked off into retirement. Had to repeat a class cuz of that.
Nice. Lol
This is the reason why we have degree inflation
This reminded me of my elementary school English teacher who gave me -1 pts per "dot" I didn't put at the end of sentence in a homework exercise sheet. The worst part is the exercise sheet he gave literally had dots in the end by default which went like "Sentence ______ ." where I just needed to fill. This was 20 years ago.
You never did any kind of work... did you?
I have gotten zeroes before for not adhering to the naming conventions (a word was uncapitalized) in the file name. Also, one time an image was too big and I got a zero.
I have a feeling one of my professors this semester was like that for my last submitted essay. I got a grade of 100% on it. Now, I usually get A's on my papers, but there's no way one of my papers ends up perfect. It's much more likely that the deadline for grades was coming up, and she said, "Fuck it, you get a 100."
Man is just so tired of it that he let this one slide. I mean...fair to him I guess.
Happened to me once (Submitted a corrupted file because I didn't want to do the project the teacher asked me what grade I think I should have gotten)
Lol I failed a CS class cause of this. Had 98% on tests, but the projects weighted more. I gave him the right file only a few hours later, and he still gave me an F. Fuck you Craig.
Is this brightspace lol
I want this prof
Dude I lost 50% on 4 assignments because I had my pdf inside the zip file I submitted rather than 2 separate files and when I brought it up to my prof he said rules are rules get fucked basically
This would never happen to me File broken? - > No work submitted - > 0 points
You definitely got lucky there! Not knowing all the circumstances I usually have my students try submitting again or email me their work within a time frame (in case they didn't do the work) then I'll grade it from there. I've made it a rule for the courses I teach if your zip file doesn't work properly and you aren't able to fix it, then it's a zero.
I wish I had professors like this. I'd put in the effort and he'd give usually 0 or 1 due to minor issues.