The “no new threads until 50 posts” is an agreeable rule for this forum, but I just got bitten by it.
Diligently holding back from spamming, with the one exception of this post, don’t worry.
Raife
3502
It means the first ninja will kill you, but after that you’ll be okay.
Strato
3503
Came home for lunch, and the sky decided to suddenly dump in the last five minutes a shitload of rain. I ain’t walking back to work in this downpour. I could swear I am in the tropics, it is almost monsoon like when realistically I’m am quite a bit too south for that.
I saw a license plate today that sadly I couldn’t snap a pic of - “GOATSE”.
As a perpetual B- average kind of student, let me just say: lol at them.
I don’t get people that talk to profs/instructors like that. I will gladly talk to my prof about the subject material but I am absolutely terrified to actually question their methods or express actual opinions to them. The most I’ve ever done is ask for a re-mark on a single question politely and the prof explained why he marked it that way. Being all mad about it wouldn’t have changed the result but it would have made him hate me. They have a lot of power and the word of some undergrad is worthless against the word of a prof, so why would you do something to piss them off or question whether they are doing their job properly.
On the other hand, I guess I shouldn’t lol. It’s good to be ambitious, and I assume in the thin-margin world of academia that I’ve never given a fuck about, that kind of grade can mess it up for you later.
They sound like entitled twerps, of course.
That is not the attitude many students have these days. Many of them have a ludicrously overbearing sense of entitlement. You see, they are paying the instructors’ salaries, god dammit, so those instructors had better teach them the material properly so they get A’s on all their assignment, or it’s the instructors’ fault.
No, really. I see this all the time.
Oh believe me I see plenty of people that think that way. What I rarely see is people that act like that towards profs. I guess it’s because all of my classes are completely objective sciences and you are either right or wrong with no possible room for argument in 99% of my evaluations, I could see some of my classmates freaking out if they got a worse mark then they thought they should have on an essay or something.
EDIT: Well that’s not true even, there’s a lot of room for argument for stuff like how many partial marks an incorrect answer is worth. Anyways I wasn’t questioning the existence of these people I was just boggling at how irrational and self destructive an attitude like that is. Even if you think that way, be smart and keep it to yourself, no-one is going to be swayed by the argument “I pay your salary!”.
Raife
3512
It’s even better when the parents get involved. Where do you think they got that attitude?
I don’t care how childish it is, I want this beanbag.
hong
3514
Is it anatomically correct?
In irrelevant random news, I just beat Mass Effect 1 in 2 days (20 hours), then promptly bought Mass Effect 2 off steam to continue my character… and it turns out my proc is a 2.0 ghz dual core and I need a 2.6+ ghz proc. /sadface
I start school back up in 2 days I’m seriously considering spending 60 bucks on a new proc just to beat Mass Effect 2 as fast as I can.
Ezdaar
3516
At US universities, at least the public ones, it’s against the law for the instructor to talk to the parents about the student’s grade. Makes life much nicer.
Since people seem to have a crippling fear of math, I never had any real attitude from the students. The ones that cried in the office were difficult though. A friend who teaches math at a junior college has a special crying chair set up for such occasions.
Raife
3518
Federal law? That’s interesting. My only experience with it was at a private university and I don’t know if they ever talked to the professors, but I know they met with university staff several of times demanding better grades for their underperforming son on the grounds that they were paying the university a lot of money.
Ezdaar
3519
When a student hits 18 or starts at a college/university the FERPA rights transfer from their parents to them. This should be the case at any university that takes Department of Education funds.
Dean
3520
I don’t give letter grades, I give numbers. Of those, I never give an odd number unless it’s a *5 (as in 75, 85, 95). Any other odd number will provoke complaints. I tell them a few things up front-- no one is going to get a hundred on a paper, because no paper is perfect. If they do not fulfill the assignment they will get a 25 out of a hundred for demonstrating that they can put words on paper.
That said, bad papers take twice as much work as good papers. So documenting why they did badly is basically what I get paid for. If anyone wants me to reconsider a grade, then be warned, the grade can go up or it can go down. I tell them that many times I consider the grade I give a bad paper an outright gift to them. If you make me read that bad paper again, I will probably write more words about why it is so bad than were in the original paper, and then I will give you the grade you really earned.
About once every four years I get someone who insists that I regrade their paper. I do, very thoroughly. Word gets around, and I’m good until all those students graduate.
