THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: -Karamazov- on 10 Nov 2008, 09:53
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Inspired by a facebook group that was recently created.
When I was in high school and we were being introduced to MLA format and using quotes and citations, I went a little overboard on the first paper. The first paper I got back said "This in an excellent paper, it is too bad that it was not written by you. Paraphrase or summarize all those quotes instead on the next paper or you will fail." I got a C on the paper, and we had a class the next day devoted to paraphrasing and summarizing multiple sources.
Also, my group and I recently got back our management paper from our professor. It was a group paper and one of the kids was incredibly late in submitting it to the rest group. He gave it to us at about 3 am, and the report was due at 8. When we got the paper back, the teacher had bracketed this kid’s section and wrote “I know you wrote this 6 hours before it was due because that is what your citation say they were accessed at. Next time read over your work and using something other than internet sources, because this section cannot stand on its own.” We ended up getting an 87 on it, most of the point deducted were because of this kid’s section.
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"oh boy"
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"Tommydskian."
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There was nothing written on the paper, I was just called to the administrators office during my next class.
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We ended up getting an 87 on it, most of the point deducted were because of this kid’s section.
Your professor is an idiot. There is no reason that the rest of the group should be punished for one person's slackassery.
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Welcome to the college of business, where team work is paramount. We are given the opportunity to "fire" anyone who slacks off. In exchange for this freedom, we receive group grade rather than individual.
We gave the kid another chance at the next paper, and he did much better work. So we didn't need to fire him.
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I've gotten bad grades on group projects before. Even when the teacher knew that one of the people was sick until the last day and the other kid never showed up until the last day. (There were four of us.) It sucks to get a lower grade because people slack off, but it happens.
I had a professor tell me once that a response to a short story was lazy. But then again, it was true, because I wanted to see what I could and could not get away with in that class.
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"A promising start, please hand in the rest by next week" or some variation.
It wasn't insulting though, it was sincere. The fact that I faced no repercussions whenever I didn't hand in the rest destroyed what little faith I had in college.
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I haven't had a teacher say anything really insulting about my work, I think, but then again, during the years where we actually got other feedback than a grade or "Ok. Approved.", I mostly got good grades and stuff. My history teacher one year was an asshole, though, and kept yawning, doodling, staring out the window and sending text messages during everyone's presentations, which was insulting, but mostly just because he was a prick, not because he insulted our/my work. He did say stuff like "I found your presentation to be sleep-inducing and not very informative.", but I sort of just chalked that up to the prick-thing.
And yeah, bad grades due to group work sucks, but it's sort of...to be expected, I guess. Once in 9th grade, I was on a group with 3 out of the 5 worst slackers in the entire year, plus one other guy. Fun times! They'd give us a 2 (on a scale from 1-6) if all members weren't present during a presentation, so the other non-slacker and I spent 3 hours looking for one of group members (this was before everyone had cell phones :o), who had decided to just lay down to sleep in the locker room, only to have him say "This is our presentation" and nothing else during the presentation. I am so glad I'm at uni now, in a program where people are actually above average interested in school and actually care about making the group look good and not ruining it for everyone else.
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It wasn't written on my work but my maths teacher at GCSE, when told that I was hoping to take a maths degree and become a secondary school teacher, laughed scornfully and said I wasn't even going to pass the GCSE let alone A levels and a degree.
I got an A. But I am now going to take Law instead.
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"please see me after class, we need to talk" on a paper i wrote about my complete lack of religious faith when the topic was to explain how this class has strengthened your catholic faith. turns out he wanted to set up faith counseling sessions with me.
"D-" on a paper i wrote about the pro-choice campaign when the topic was to present your argument for or against abortion. why put in the 'for' option is they don't want to read the answer? stupid ta.... took it to the prof and he gave me an A.
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I kind of feel bad now because I WAS that guy that slacked off in groups. Like, I went to sleep the day of our presentation and actually said "no, fuck you guys" when they kept telling me to come up to the front.
Passed that class with a C though, never did any work, slept all the time, passed with a C.
I love education.
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"please see me after class, we need to talk" on a paper i wrote about my complete lack of religious faith when the topic was to explain how this class has strengthened your catholic faith. turns out he wanted to set up faith counseling sessions with me.
"D-" on a paper i wrote about the pro-choice campaign when the topic was to present your argument for or against abortion. why put in the 'for' option is they don't want to read the answer? stupid ta.... took it to the prof and he gave me an A.
Did you go to a hardcore private catholic school? Giving someone a bad grade simply because they have a different opinion, that's horrific.
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"crap. fail"
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I never really got anything horrific put on my paper, but my friend got some odd comment on his last history paper. He had to take a swing at a section of history and discuss something about it, using citation and such to reason his conclusion. The teacher outright told him he did not agree with his paper and told him to do it again.
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In actuality, though not quite taken as an insult, my sophomore English teacher wrote the following on a test I took on an Ayn Rand book (Paraphrased):
"Jon, I know for a fact this was completely B.S.ed. I saw you looking over a summary before class. That said, B.S.ing people is a legitimate life skill and this was extremely well writen B.S. I am all about learning experiences. What I've learned here is to make my tests harder, please try to avoid learning that nobody cheats me twice."
I still managed a 110 on the test through an extra credit essay question (The aforementioned well written B.S.). I don't think I ever actually read a single book in that class before the test, though I did read a couple of the required reading assignments after the tests as a result of being intrigued by the test questions.
That teacher was awesome.
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It wasn't me who had it but in Religious Studies one year, we had to write about our beliefs about death. In response to the question "do you believe that it is possible to die too young?" my friend wrote that if children die, it is too young as they haven't had time to live their lives.
The teacher failed her and wrote "God decides when people die, and it is always the right time".
I do not object to her believing that. But I do object to her teaching it. It was a compulsory class about different religions and their beliefs, not about her personal beliefs and how they were the only ones to have.
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Jesus shit. That is horrible.
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I kind of feel bad now because I WAS that guy that slacked off in groups. Like, I went to sleep the day of our presentation and actually said "no, fuck you guys" when they kept telling me to come up to the front.
I am glad you were never in my groups. I am the kind of group member who turns into the drill sergeant when people don't do their share. This is mostly because I hate working in groups with people I don't know, especially for classes that are electives and therefore I don't know any of my group members outside of this one class, if I ever even talk to them at all.
If I ever become a teacher, I doubt I will have group projects. If I do, I will not to group average grades, because they are STUPID.
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I am the kind of group member who turns into the drill sergeant when people don't do their share.
There would have been frequent arguments with me. With most of them ending in "you know how much I don't care?"
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When someone pulled the "You know how much I don't care" thing with any member of a group I was in, we made the time we had to work with them a living hell or just generally ostracized them. One time we actually made a kid leave class crying after some of the group had a bad day.
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I haven't got anything really bad. I have written a short story the night before it was due. I lost sleep but got an A the next day.
Wacky, huh?
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I hate group work. If people don't do their fair share of the work I'll just do it all. Actually, I usually just do it all anyways because I don't trust anyone else to do it and am much happier relying on myself.
I had one sociology teacher tell me my opinion about mental health institutions was wrong. But she also wrote "watch your grammer" on that paper, so I wasn't very worried.
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I had a creative writing teacher write "You make me hate my life" on a paper. In all fairness that may have been the intention...
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One professor crossed out my entire introductory paragraph in red and wrote, "Totally re-imagine the intro. See me on this," and when I did, he told me that it was way too general, the paper never really went anywhere, and overall my writing could use tightening. I was in my third year as an English major and had just started working in the University Writing Center: writing was my whole life, and it hurt to be told I was bad at it. But I really liked him as a professor, so I ended up taking two more classes with him (and, ultimately, getting a letter of recommendation for graduate school from him)--my writing DID improve a lot. It's still terrifying, though, to see a gigantic red X over your first page when you get a paper back.
Another professor, in a GE sociology course, accused me of plagiarism because he didn't believe I was smart enough to use as many three- and four-syllable words as I did. Or something.
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I had a teacher give me a test back and say "I don't think you got a single thing right on this." She made me work on the test more. I still didn't get anything right.
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I had a test like that once. But the class was a 500 level class required for sophomores and the test was fucking ridiculous. Luckily, she let us take them home and redo them.
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Mine was a spanish 1 test.
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I win at this.
C- on a paper about Machiavelli. He drew a giant flower on the front page, because he thought it was 'too flowery.' On the final page he drew a giant question mark because he wasn't assed to understand my conclusion properly. His comments on the back consisted of 'This paper is not one that can be accepted as worthy of this university, or any university course for that matter.' When I emailed him about it, he said 'I use the spirogram method for my flowers! It sort of gives them a mass produced feel, doesn't it? Do you wish I'd spent more time on it?'
Fucking bizarre.
ETA
Oh and another funny one was this time in Junior year when I didn't have the motivation to do the assignment in High School, so I waited until the last minute and just wrote whatever the hell I felt like, banking on my flowery script (at the time; my handwriting has changed a lot over the years) to deter any close reading. Unfortunately, the assignment was a Dear John letter during the Civil War, and the way I entertained myself was by making it bawdy as all hell. The teacher circled the whole thing in red pen and wrote at the bottom 'SETTLE DOWN ;o)'
Actually that would have been fine from any other teacher, but this guy was weird. He probably thought the same of me, to be honest.
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"Nonsense" written in a red marker/crayon
Not too many chances for creative criticism in engineering classes
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I usually can't read a thing that lecturers or teachers write on my essays. We're told that we can go talk to them after the class to ask about it, but I'm always too afraid that the comments are rubbish! But I have had a teacher refuse to take in anything I had handwritten because he couldn't read it so I guess it works both ways! I understand though, my handwriting is truely rubbish. God bless computers.
Whenever we had group work to do we always had to fill in a form at the end to say what we thought about working in a group and how well we worked together. That was the time we would write whether or not people had done f all on the project and the teacher would mark it accordingly if all of the group said someone hadn't been contributing.
And I miss American work. I used to be able to write an essay the night before and get 98%. Now I'm back in England and I'm desperately hoping for a 60+ on the essay I just handed in which I put a lot more effort into!! I'm looking forward to seeing if I can read any of the feedback I get...
Speaking of which... I should really be working right now. *sigh*
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I had a teacher who wouldn't put x's by wrong answers, but instead ?'s. It always felt as if he was saying: this is so wrong I have no idea why you put this as the answer. He was one of my favorite teachers.
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And I miss American work.
You know it really depends on which schools you go to. Not sayin', just sayin'
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I have a few memorable ones, although none are really insulting.
I had a philosophy professor who never gave me a grade higher than an A--/B++. Yes, the whole thing was the grade.
I had a first year intro to college type class that required a ten-page paper. There were no font specifications given in those days, so I used Courier 12pt, which is a fairly large typeface. I also put an extra space between every word. The prof wrote "I am not sure why you are using this odd font."
During my last year of high school, every single teacher chose the following multiple choice comments for my report card: "A PLEASURE TO TEACH. CAPABLE OF BETTER WORK."
In my college Shakespeare course, we were required to complete two of three major assignments, and could choose one to not do. I chose not to do two of them. I then figured out that the only way I could pass the course would be to write an absolutely flawless final exam. I lived near the professor and ended up walking home at the same time he did a few days after the exam. "Edith," he said. "It is a downright shame I cannot give you a higher grade than a C in the courthe, becauthe your ethay ith the betht one I have ever read by an undergraduate thtudent. I have never given any thtudent one hundred perthent on a final ectham until you." (yeah, he had a wicked lisp)
I'm a slacker. I really am capable of better work. At pretty much everything.
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Underachieving high five! o_
This is the first semester of my entire college career I've applied myself, because I did so bad last semester that I was suspended. I've gone from a solid 2.0 GPA student to 4.0 as if by magic. The academic counselor basically told me to stop coming to see her because seeing her every week was part of the terms of my readmittance because she expected to need to tutor me.
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_o low five?
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In highschool my year coordinator was asking everyone what they planned to do after they finished so they could advise them on what electives to take. When I said that I wanted to be a psychologist he just smiled and said "James, I don't think you're smart enough to do that. In fact I can categorically say you will never be accepted into that kind of course. Do you have any other...achievable ambitions?" Dude was an utter cunt.
When I was in my final year of my BA I got 56% on an essay for my Social Processes and Behaviour class. The comments said "Most of my first year studets can reference better than you can. I don't understand how you've made it this far if this is the quality of work you put in. You're writing style is good and with effort it could be great but you haven't written nearly enough. I know I said you have to be concise but I still want you to write to the word limit." I felt pretty terrible because this guy was my favourite lecturer.
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This is the first semester of my entire college career I've applied myself, because I did so bad last semester that I was suspended. I've gone from a solid 2.0 GPA student to 4.0 as if by magic.
:-D
(read: I hate my GPA, and my life)
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In highschool my year coordinator was asking everyone what they planned to do after they finished so they could advise them on what electives to take. When I said that I wanted to be a psychologist he just smiled and said "James, I don't think you're smart enough to do that. In fact I can categorically say you will never be accepted into that kind of course. Do you have any other...achievable ambitions?" Dude was an utter cunt.
Well, you are a cephalopod. I think it's pretty remarkable you're even typing on a computer, really.
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"James, I don't think you're smart enough to do that. In fact I can categorically say you will never be accepted into that kind of course. Do you have any other...achievable ambitions?" Dude was an utter cunt.
Actually my guidance counselor told me when I told her that I wanted to go to Wellesley that I 'don't have a shit in the chute' of getting in. Not only was it insulting, but it was also true, and I don't even think it's a real phrase.
Man.
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Pretty much every report card I got had some variation on the old "could do better if he applied himself" routine. Do they just write that shit on everyone's cards or what?
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Actually, that's what all my teacher wrote about me for year 11.
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Your professor is an idiot. There is no reason that the rest of the group should be punished for one person's slackassery.
Conversely, I've always found it annoying when people whine about the unfairness of their grade being affected by their team members. Tell the teacher about problem team members certainly, but the time to deal with problems is BEFORE the project is due, not after; be proactive, don't be a whiner.
Sorry folks, in the real world you gotta deal with other people's shit, so in your group projects you are learning (among other things) how to deal with other people's shit. You are a team, and you get graded as a team. I mean, if the performance of other people in your group shouldn't affect your grade, then why even do a group project? Why not simply have each person turn in their own paper?
I remember once when she was studying for her MBA, my fiancee went on a rant one night about how one person in her group was a slacker and not doing their share of the work, and the project was due on Monday (it was the weekend.) I nodded along, sympathizing, because I've certainly been there and it is extremely frustrating. When she was done ranting she took a deep breath and asked, "So what should I do?" I responded, "Well, you should do the work." I mean, in the long term you want to avoid working with the slacker again, and probably communicate that fact to the teacher, but in the short term you have a paper to do.
Again, think of the real-world: If you have to work together with other people in your department to prepare a report for the board or something, then if the report sucks you all get chewed out. Whine all you want about whether or not it's fair, but that's how it is, so learn to deal with it. The time to complain to your manager about slackers on the team is as soon as the problem is apparent, not after the board has seen the finished report.
What I wish is not that teachers were more "fair" in grading group members, but that more teachers were explicit about the point of group projects. That is, they directly state up-front that because group projects are for you to learn to work in a group, your grade is in part a reflection of how well your group functions.
I also wish teachers taught a bit more directly how to function in groups rather than simply expect people to figure it out on their own, but then it's mostly common sense sort of stuff that people just seem to forget.
On a closely related note, people also whine about it being unfair if they can't choose their own group members. There are compelling arguments both ways, but personally I prefer randomly-formed groups for group projects in classes. This is a view I've had crystallized from classes I've taken but note that I haven't enforced this in any classes that I've taught. I have a couple anecdotes to share about this too, but I don't really want to rant here too much (at least not right now, heh.)
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Joe Hocking, what is the most insulting comment you have ever written on someone's work?
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On my report cards from about 8th grade to 12th grade, I had some variant of "great personality, horrible student"
Every single one of my teachers loved me as a person, I was generally 20% (random statistic) higher than the rest of the class on an intellectual level, so I could actually talk to them about stuff and they'd understand the point I was making, but goddamn if I wasn't a slacker.
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Joe Hocking, what is the most insulting comment you have ever written on someone's work?
Actually I've ruminated several times on how I'm not hard enough on people. I mean, I probably don't want to go to the extreme of telling someone their piece looks like garbage (although when I once had a teacher tell me that in a crit, it was a valuable wake-up call) but I really should hold people more accountable. Thing is, at SAIC in particular it's pretty easy for me to just let people slide, since there aren't any grades. In the short term it can be painful of course to get harsh feedback, but in the long term not giving someone harsh feedback when they deserve it is just teaching them that it's okay to be a slacker and/or do shitty work.
Basically, I tend to be somewhat ruthless about how my students are doing, but I'm not ruthless in the sense of yelling at them or insulting them or whatever, but in the sense that I expect people to motivate themselves, so if someone is not trying very hard then I simply let them fail. I gotta change that.
"A promising start, please hand in the rest by next week" or some variation.
It wasn't insulting though, it was sincere. The fact that I faced no repercussions whenever I didn't hand in the rest destroyed what little faith I had in college.
I really wish more people were like you, and expect to be held accountable, as opposed to the majority of students who seem genuinely shocked that not doing the assignments has a detrimental affect on their grade.
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"ur a fag"
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I had a creative writing teacher write "You make me hate my life" on a paper. In all fairness that may have been the intention...
I am so tempted to use this line sometime.
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It wasn't a written comment but I had my lecturer tell me my acoustic recording was "bizarre" upon handing it back to me. I'm pretty sure the written comments I've received have several times had words to the effect of "did you do [insert technique here] on purpose?".
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I'm trying to think, but honestly I personally have never had a negative grade on a paper that I've written by myself. My writing has always been praised by all my teachers/professors, and is something that I'm extremely proud of. I'm sure I'll get a wake-up call one day in the form of a prof. saying a paper I write is shit, though.
HOWEVER,
when it comes to group work, I write my section well, and then make absolutely no attempt to coordinate it with others. Just a few days ago, I was in a group and we were acting as a consulting firm of sorts, for the government of Kenya, advising them on how to stabilize their political and economic situation. My prof. started writing comments on the margins like normal but after the first few pages, they disappeared. "That's weird," my group thought. We got to the end, and he wrote, in all caps "WHAT IS WITH YOUR STRUCTURE? I HAD TO STOP WRITING COMMENTS BECAUSE, DUE TO YOUR LACK OF COORDINATION BETWEEN THE SEGMENTS YOU WROTE AS INDIVIDUALS, YOUR PAPER JUMPS ABOUT LIKE A SCHIZOPHRENIC MOUSE."
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I did a paper on math and when i got it back it said *Call me **** **** :)* i was a little creaped out...
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when I first read that I thought you were just self censoring cuss words so I read that as "Call me shit cunt"
I was a little relieved when I figured out what you actually meant.
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Perhaps the most insulting thing a professor ever done in regards to my work (teacher in this case, since it was senior year in High School) was not something written on my work, but announced to the whole class.
She stated to the whole class "This is the worst grade I have ever seen." and then proceeded to laugh. At that point, it was almost as if I was suffering from head trauma. I couldn't process this for a few seconds.
Normally, I would have been able to ignore it, but this was during the last year of my grandfathers life (I live with my grandparents.) He was bed ridden, his bladder had failed to function, he was also suffering from an infection that refused to die and he was also suffering from Parkinson's which had gotten a lot worse in a short span of time. In short, academics were not exactly easy at the time and it was just not the time to have to put up with that kind of bullshit from a teacher.
I thought it was a little out of character for this teacher, because we were normally on good terms.
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when I first read that I thought you were just self censoring cuss words so I read that as "Call me shit cunt"
I was a little relieved when I figured out what you actually meant.
why would you take it as that, there is so many other expletive combinations
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Our uni only does one unit of Ancient History, so when I had that as one of my majors, the second semester I had to do it externally through another uni. I went from being a straight HD student at USQ to just passing my first assignment by 1 mark at UNE. Not only that, but they wrote me a 6 page essay (I am not even kidding) on how much I sucked at EVERYTHING. I passed the next assignment by 3 marks!
Also in my first year of Vis Arts, my drawing lecturer was really encouraging and told me my work was good etc etc. But when I signed up to do the drawing course for the second semester he told me 'not to bother coming back to this course',. I was all WUT. but then I did textiles instead, which became my favourite subject and the one I did until I graduated, so that's not all bad!
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I kind of feel bad now because I WAS that guy that slacked off in groups. Like, I went to sleep the day of our presentation and actually said "no, fuck you guys" when they kept telling me to come up to the front.
I was generally 20% (random statistic) higher than the rest of the class on an intellectual level, so I could actually talk to them about stuff and they'd understand the point I was making, but goddamn if I wasn't a slacker.
Here are some more random statistics:
60% of people reckon they are smarter than you
70% of people have been slack at some point
80% of people have been given grief from a person who slacked off in their group work.
90% of people think you sound kind of like a douchebag to go to school with.
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to be fair i really was a lot smarter than everyone else in my high school and kind of an asshole too. the fact that i made it to uni despite having over 150 missed classes by my senior year and having spent almost every day high pretty much says it right there.
we're just sharing stories, relax a bit.
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"Some of this appears 'lifted'"
I got that comment on an essay I wrote in grade 10. I put work into that paper, and it was reflected in the well-organized structure and strong argument - but because I could actually write a proper essay (whereas many of my classmates could not), I was being accused of plagiarism. I've never been so offended.
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Oh now if we're talking about stuff that teachers have SAID in class ...
Freshman year, my band director sat me down in front of the whole class and yelled at me that my 'face was obnoxious' and that it was 'making [him] sick.'
That was pretty bad.
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The papers I got bad grades and comments on, it was usually because I didn't start a 5-page paper until 3am the day it was due, so I was 15 minutes late to class and it was a page too short and had no conclusion and so on. I never really figured out how to do drafts, so the papers would start out fine because I was still awake, and just go downhill into the night, becoming less and less coherent..
Someone in the PhD program at my university got "So what?" as the only comment on their thesis proposal.
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Wow. I've been blessed to have some professors over the years who weren't total dickpigs with regards to their grading. Fuck, I made off easier than the lot of you!
Actually, any stupid comments I got on my papers were from my classmates during peer review. "This paper doesn't have a thesis, I looked all over the first page." Or worse yet, "There's too many big words in this paper!"
A college student SAID THAT. If a civil mind had not gotten the best of me, I would've slugged him with an unabridged dictionary. I've hated him ever since, on account that he is an honest-to-God retard.
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I haven't really had any insulting comments on my own papers (often I'm frustrated by the lack of comment), but there was one girl in my English class (note: we're Norwegian and are taking English as a second language) who got the comment "Are you dyslexic?" on her paper. She's not.
That same teacher tends to write things like "yes" and "hmm" all over my papers, often with some smiley faces thrown in. ._. She's odd.
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I have a professor who gives Map Quizzes on the areas we talk about in class --well, I'm in her Asian History course right now, and I didn't exactly study for the first one... So I basically just guessed on everything. I had a general idea of where things were, but apparently I was very, very wrong because on the side of my paper she wrote, "Sam, what happened?!"
...Obviously this professor doesn't know me well enough to know what a horrible slacker I am...
And yet, she still loves me as as student. I don't get it.
I've got some other good ones, but I'll have to find the papers.
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If we're talking peer review, I have never yet had a single peer review where the person reviewing hasn't gone "I don't know what half of these words mean". I spent most of my high school life trying to dumb myself down because I got quite badly disliked for being "stuck up", but now I go with the method of not dumbing down, but being careful not to sound condescending or arrogant.
I got quite upset in the first term of college when I had a review thing with my english teacher, who told me she had given me a 2 on class contribution because I "answered too many questions and didn't give the other students a chance". There were seven of us in the class, one of whom never spoke, and if I didn't answer we sat in silence for several minutes because the teacher never called on anyone. I didn't feel that the fact that no one else would answer was my fault, really.
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"surprisingly good"
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If we're talking peer review, I have never yet had a single peer review where the person reviewing hasn't gone "I don't know what half of these words mean".
Oh man, I spent like twenty minutes trying to convince some guys in a peer-review group I was in that "chattel" was a real word. They didn't believe me. I had to get the professor in on the argument, and she commended me on use of the word, and assured them that yes, it was a real word. And this was Freshman -Honors- English...meaning we were supposed to be too good to be in a 101 English course. ...Right.
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the worst thing that's happened to me was when I delivered a paper that I'd not spent any time at all on really, just throwing something down on a paper. The thing was full of spelling mistakes (this was before the computers were introduced in school). My teacher wanted me to go have a dyslexia test. I've never been so angry in school (well, except the time I punched Ladybug's brother. But that's another story). I had the best text understanding and reading speed in my class, and annually went to writing-things in the summer.
And I just got back a paper on how we can see tracks of the antique theater in modern European theater. My teacher gave me a bad grade, because I did not write anything about how theater was formed in the antique Greece. She said that I hadn't understood the assignment. Seriously, what?
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lots of stuff about group projects
I agree with you. I just graduated earlier this year after spending the last three years putting myself through night school to finish my degree. I can, in all honesty, say that in all of the group projects that I was a part of, I voluntarily and without complaint did the lion's share of the work assigned simply because I didn't want to have to trust other people not to fuck me over. But if it is obvious to the professor that one person isn't doing their fair share, as it was in the given example, I still maintain that it isn't fair to punish the rest of the people. I would say that making people do group projects is punishment enough, period.
And if we're talking about things that have been said by professors/teachers... my eighth grade Earth Science teacher told me that he didn't want to recommend me for AP science for ninth grade because I was too much of a slacker. I finished the class with an A, I aced my midterm and got a 96 on the final, despite not having done any of the homework assigned all year. I was a slacker, of course, but obviously I wasn't being challenged by regular science classes.
And then in my senior year of high school, in AP English, we had writing assignments due weekly. I was still not doing my homework, which was a habit that lasted until I had to pay my own way through college, so I got to class early the day the assignment was due and wrote a quick and pretty shitty poem about my friend Scott who had moved away. My professor loved it, I got a 100 on it, and she made me read it in front of the rest of the class. I was mortified and the jerks in my class made fun of me for a few weeks afterward. And my best friend still gives me shit about it to this day, and we graduated high school over ten years ago.
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I really wish more people were like you, and expect to be held accountable, as opposed to the majority of students who seem genuinely shocked that not doing the assignments has a detrimental affect on their grade.
Yeah, me too. I'm not going to put in any effort if my teachers don't take an interest in me or my work, or even if I turn up or not, especially if I don't care too much about the work. I know that I have to write up about what I did to show I understand what I'm doing, but I don't give a shit about that as opposed to taking photos, or writing, or making films.
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And this was Freshman -Honors- English...meaning we were supposed to be too good to be in a 101 English course. ...Right.
American High School honors courses have long since been a joke. I actually dropped Honors English my senior year because there were too many people in it. Parents bitch and moan when their children aren't regarded as special snowflakes and schools subsequently cave to their demands and put them in honors courses in an effort to appease them, and are then forced to dumb the class down to maintain some kind of grading curve. I dropped it after a week after realizing I wasn't going to actually learn shit in there and due to my absolute disgust at the presence of some of the individuals in the class (Some of the biggest idiots I have ever met in my life). I was righteously pissed off about the circumstance, as I had busted my ass to get into that class on my own merit and done a summer project as an entrance requirement which I figured would account for jack shit upon dropping. Luckily, the same teacher was teaching the standard level English class and graciously graded the summer assignment into my overall grade as extra credit.
The aforementioned honors class contained, as I recall, thirty-four students (Close to half of my graduating class of 84 people). The standard course I dropped into had seven students. We subsequently outpaced the honors class by a good margin due to the fact the honors class had to slow down to accommodate the large class size (And the fact most of the dumber, more well to do students were in the honors class) while we breezed through everything since teaching just over a half dozen students takes minimal effort, comparatively.
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I don't really understand the American grading system, can someone explain it to me? For comparison, here in the UK you do work all year round but it is preparing you for the summer exams and your grade is based on what percentage of marks you get in that exam. Occasionally you have coursework which means a big project that is marked externally by the examiners (as are the exams) and it makes up usually a third of your grade, but the actual teacher never has any input into your final grade except for teaching you stuff.
I gather that isn't the way in the US?
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The way most American schools work is that the year is divided into segments (usually halves, thirds, or quarters) and you get a grade for each term based on the grades you got on papers/hw/tests/whatever, at the end of the year you have a final, and all of the grades are averaged for your final year grade. All of the grading is by the teachers (usually) and what you're graded on changes from teacher to teacher.
At least, that's how my school works, and the schools I've gone to before.
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Not usually. Given the abundance of "bad test-takers" out here, most people seem to prefer the American way.
In Primary / Secondary / Undergrad education, this seems to be the norm, at least that I've found -
Final grade = 100%
10% = Homework
25% = Final Exam
25% = Midterm Exam
20% = Assorted in-class Quizzes
20% = Labs / Essays / Projects / the like
It varies, some classes have only exams and quizzes, some have no projects but lots of homework, etc. In high school homework was of far more importance (much to my personal detriment). But generally exams are a sizable chunk but not the entirety of your grade.
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Oh the days of frequent homework. I definitely don't miss that useless waste of time...
Fun teacher stories!:
My senior year of high school, our Honors Humanities class (which was actually good, because our teacher actually had a masters degree in literature and knew what he was talking about) required a major paper at the end of each semester. Obviously by the end of the year I didn't care...I got a C. His comment on the top of the front page: "What the hell happened here? This isn't you!!!"
Most insulting thing ever was also senior year of high school-- my Psychology professor basically telling me I'd be lucky to get into the University of Wisconsin- Madison (a good school, but NOT where I wanted to go) because I was too stupid to possibly test high enough on the SAT for anywhere out of state to accept me. Asshole.
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Just to add on what you said:
The work(homework, quizzes, projects etc.) can be weighted differently.
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Not exactly on a paper or insulting, but relevantish?
I'd just handed in an assignment in English class - we were preparing for the Leaving Cert, and the teacher had given us the task of writing a magazine feature article. I'd decided to go a bit wild, and write a bit of 'gonzo' journalism. Something about a travel writer getting drunk with some Irish sterotypes. It turned out fine, I got an A- I think, but the teacher wasn't all that happy with it. He came up to my room in the evening (I was in boarding school), and called me out for writing something that I knew he'd like, and that I wouldn't write anything like it for the real exam. When I told him that I'd write exactly the same thing, he was impressed. Told me I was an idiot for risking running into a teacher who might hate it in such an important exam, but impressed.
Also, I think I've only ever started one paper more than three days in advance of the due date - in fact I don't think I turned in a philosophy essay on time in second or third year.
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This one I got from a soccer coach:
"You did better than I thought you would."
I just glared at him.
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And this was Freshman -Honors- English...meaning we were supposed to be too good to be in a 101 English course. ...Right.
American High School honors courses have long since been a joke.
I am pretty sure she was talking about college? She used the terms 'professor' and '101'.
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Yes, I was.
But I think the statement that Honors classes are kind of a joke are is still valid.
I knew quite a few people that just tested well and got into the class, but they obviously didn't belong there when it came time to write a paper or read the literature.
...Mind you, I aced every paper and didn't read a damn thing for class --and all of her comments were flowery about my interesting ideas towards the literature and how well I understood certain passages... Mind you, I got all of that class discussion and Spark Notes summaries. Nice.
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my first year university english class completely lost their shit when they found out 10% of our final mark would be based on a ten-question grammar quiz. i'm pretty sure i was the only person silently rejoicing about my free 10%.
students in university still don't know the difference between your and you're? seriously?
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maybe i am being overly cynical and generalizing here but i really think it was more because these were silly people who don't read books and never had any incentive to learn proper english cos of microsoft word and spellcheck and all that. it's a little implausible that almost an entire class of white, middle class, privileged kids failed a very simple grammar quiz because every single one of them had a learning disability.
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Knowing the difference between "your" and "you're" is really either poor grammar or just a lack of care when writing.
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In Primary / Secondary / Undergrad education, this seems to be the norm, at least that I've found -
Final grade = 100%
10% = Homework
25% = Final Exam
25% = Midterm Exam
20% = Assorted in-class Quizzes
20% = Labs / Essays / Projects / the like
It varies, some classes have only exams and quizzes, some have no projects but lots of homework, etc. In high school homework was of far more importance (much to my personal detriment). But generally exams are a sizable chunk but not the entirety of your grade.
This is the norm at most schools, but note that there are a few (including the school I'm teaching at now) that just plain don't have grades. Speaking from the perspective of a teacher, not having grades as a way of giving feedback on how people are doing isn't an easy adjustment to get used to.
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apparently a lot of schools are doing this now as part of something called the self-esteem movement, which is based on the idea that kids who feel better about themselves end up being more successful in life, and because bad grades make kids feel shitty about themselves, grading systems should be eliminated. this movement also includes eliminating scoring systems in kids sports teams and giving everyone a trophy despite who actually wins or loses, and making kids in school give class presentations on how awesome they are, and a bunch of other crap. not surprisingly, this tends to have the opposite effect of making kids pretty stupid cos they don't learn from their mistakes and end up having no incentive to try at anything. i think it's ridiculous.
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8th grade
"You do absolutely no work in class, you fall asleep everyday, and you never even attempt to give me an excuse when you fail to turn in homework. Stop getting As on my tests."
It was true…
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Kind of like how so many school systems in America are automatically passing students (classes can't be failed)...I had a thread related to this a month or so ago.
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There's classes you can't fail? Seriously? Where?
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English is apparently one of them.
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"Me fail English? That's unpossible."
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60% of people reckon they are smarter than you
70% of people have been slack at some point
80% of people have been given grief from a person who slacked off in their group work.
90% of people think you sound kind of like a douchebag to go to school with.
To be honest. I wasn't the smartest kid ever, but I went to a pretty shitty school. The teachers were glad when you showed up not on drugs and not pregnant.
And I was a douchebag to go to school with, I admit that. since I graduated I've become much less of a douche.
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"Whose is this? You don't even study here"
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apparently a lot of schools are doing this now as part of something called the self-esteem movement
Well in all fairness to institutions like Brown or SAIC that don't have grades, it's a really different thing on a college level than a K-12 level. I mean, in college the expectation (although admittedly this is only rarely true) is that the students are independent-minded adults who set their own priorities.
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I never really had problems with teachers or professors writing nasty things on papers. I always had issues with the teachers / professors saying nasty things to me or my parents. In 10th grade, during a parent / teacher conference (These were the bane of my existence.), the upper school head asked me what my major would be in college. I told her that I was planning on majoring in marine biology. She laughed, and told me (in front of my mother) that I wasn't smart enough to be a science major and that I should be a theater major instead, because that was the only thing I was good at. After she said that, I was very concerned for her well-being, because I thought my mother was going to slug her. Fortunately (for the head, not for me; I would have loved to see it) she didn't, but explicitly told the head that she had no idea what she was talking about and that she was obviously deranged and unfit to work with students. Oddly enough, a year after I left the school, this head was fired for being an alcoholic and bringing her booze to work.
I also had issues with teachers not believing me when I corrected something they said or wrote on the board. At least once a week, I would correct my english teacher on a piece of grammar that was used incorrectly or a misspelling on the board. And equally as often, I'd get kicked out of class for insubordination. I was never rude or demeaning to the teacher, I just politely pointed out the mistake. Either he / she would announce that I had to be wrong and I'd be forced to get a dictionary and prove that I was right, or I would just be told to "leave my damn room."
Now, granted, I am a bit of a pedant when it comes to grammar or spelling. However, I never saw the need to "show up" the teacher. The mistakes (especially written on the board) would almost glow, and I couldn't focus on anything else until it was fixed. Made me crazy.
...maybe I am a little bit crazy.
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Well, now I guess I understand your username.
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There's classes you can't fail? Seriously? Where?
I had the best Earth Science class ever once at community college. And by that, I mean worst. You see, a 60% grade or higher was an A and 30% was still passing. The grades were based completely on the multiple choice exams, of which there were 4 and your lowest score was thrown out. I didn't give a shit about my GPA at that point and was taking several genuinely hard classes that semester so the second I heard the grading criteria I resolved to never show up except for exams and never studied. You know the difference between a tree and a rock? Here's your C! Have a nice day and enjoy spring break! The only way you could really fail is if you were both a complete moron AND tremendously unlucky or just never showed up for the tests. That said, it was apparently a hard class to get an A in, since the teacher was genuinely terrible. Hurray 2 year colleges. :roll:
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My community college was pretty good. Two spring semesters ago I had to write about 60 pages worth of papers and do 20-30 hours of Flash programming in about a month, on top of a 25-hour workweek. I was more referring to high schools making passing mandatory, not colleges, although there are obviously some that also suffer from this.
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A friend of mine is having real trouble with last summer's computing grade, because one of the three modules that he took was totally messed up. It was coursework-based but they didn't mark the actual coursework (which they'd spent all year working). Instead, there was an exam in which you had to justify your programming choices and reference the relevant page of the work. There was one mark for each page reference and four or five marks for each long answer relating to those pages.
The problem is that my friend got most of the page numbers mixed up. I'm not sure why; it's either because he's dyslexic (he is quite severly dyslexic) or because he was in a rush when he wrote them on the project, I can't remember. That wouldn't be a problem except that the paper was marked in a way that meant you couldn't get the marks for the answers unless you had also got the mark for the page number. Therefore he lost about twenty marks based on three or four one-mark mistakes. The real bummer is that he was two marks off passing the paper, and the exam board have now cancelled the syllabus so he can't retake it. It's dragged his overall grade down to a C, despite getting a high A on one paper and a high B on the other.
The college is going with a new exam board in future.
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I can't think of a time when something insulting was written on a paper or project I turned in. However, much of my upper division work in college consisted of papers and dissertations that were dozens of pages long. The minimum requirement of pages was often (at least) twenty-five pages of original content, sometimes the minimum was forty to fifty pages.
Consistently, I would receive my paper back (that I'd labored on for weeks) with two thirds of the pages unread and an arbitrary number written on the cover page. It was pretty clear when a professor hadn't even read the paper completely, the area around the staple would be uncreased and the writing in the margins would cease after five pages or so. Sometimes, they wouldn't even bother to flip to the back and read the conclusion, or even glance at the footnotes or works cited.
Usually, a short discussion with professor would raise the grade if I wasn't happy with it but I never understood why they bothered assigning huge projects, expect us to pour hours and hours of work into them and then not even bother to even skim all the way through and have the audacity to give it a grade. I'd say that was more insulting than anything they could have written, especially since the paper was, more often than not, one of three things that your final grade was based on.
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"You know I really don't think you will pass this subject" when I went to get my teacher to sign the form to do TEE English (the easiest one you need to get into the stream that leads more directly to university). I thought "That's a load of crap" at the time but in the end I failed it with about 37% after writing "this is pretty much bullshit" or something to that effect on my final exam paper and walking out. Maybe she was onto something (Incidently I was one of maybe three people in my class who could read fluently out loud, also now I am pretty much where I wanted to be so take that public highschool).
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"This is not the good kind of bullshit".
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I once heard a story about a professor at oxford who wrote "Your work is both interesting and original, however the parts that are original aren't interesting and the parts that are interesting aren't original."
As for me i think the worst comment i've received is that i was glib when analysing a picture of an obese child eating McDonalds. To be fair i did describe the child as a "bloated monster with a look of cherubic ecstasy smeared across his face like so much special sauce" or something like that.
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"You understand all the concepts and participate fantastically in class, but i'd wish you'd hand in your work on time so I wouldn't have to fail you."
lol I think C+ was considered to be an amazing mark in that class, I did not learrn anything except how to use french curves and t-square like my life depended on it. Stupid design class.
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"you should become a fiction writer because most of this is fiction."
- on my history exam
to be fair, i had compared greek heroes to the terminator and other movie characters
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"I think you might want to switch to another language - Latin is obviously not your forte"
I had gotten a 62 on my Latin final and my teacher was sick. But she had been sick for a week and a half before the final, so I couldn't talk to her about my questions, so I did really badly. I'm still in the process of fixing the grade even though it was last june.
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maybe i am being overly cynical and generalizing here but i really think it was more because these were silly people who don't read books and never had any incentive to learn proper english cos of microsoft word and spellcheck and all that. it's a little implausible that almost an entire class of white, middle class, privileged kids failed a very simple grammar quiz because every single one of them had a learning disability.
This. Holy balls, Word has made it easy to slack off. I've always been a florid writer (my style of composition formed around 8th grade and hasn't really changed) so I took care with these things, but other people I know just didn't care. My best friend from high school is a pretty smart guy, so it came as a massive shock to me when he had me proofread an essay of his in college and it was maybe 4th grade level, spelling and grammar wise. When I confronted him with it his excuse was "I've got spellcheck!", despite the fact that the program only picked up about half of his grammar errors, some words were incorrectly changed, and overall the essays were just constructed out of shit. And where's spellcheck when you're faced with an actual written assignment?\\
I about punched him in his Czech face.
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In my english class last week we were all in hoots as the teacher read out particularly choice phrases from one girl's essay (the girl in question was also laughing her head off, she knows it was a bad essay). She referred to King Lear as "that bloke" and used the phrase "and other stuff". The problem is that most people don't read enough formal writing to know how to use it. It's also not something we're properly taught at school here, and when you reach eighteen and can't write an essay without resorting to colloquialisms, there is something wrong.
That said, even I struggle when I read an article in the Times referring to a woman living "without a hint of unction or moral hauteur". Who exactly uses these words? I mean, really. Unction?
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While I know unction has that secondary meaning, I would prefer the word unctuousness in that position; but I can't conceive of writing that sentence anyway.
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That just sounds like they used a thesaurus without actually understanding the word.
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Oh, well, I guess the Times writes like a college freshman then
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Formal writing has really begun to go down hill. When ever I have a group project, I am usually the one who volunteers to put together everyone's individual parts. I do this because I enjoy editing the paper and I like to see the final product come together. Another reason is I do this is because I just don't trust some of the other people with the task. After seeing some people's writing styles, making a group paper sound coherent is pretty hard.
There was a kid in my last group, his idea of formal writing meant using the thesaurus to make every short and properly used adjective long and superfluous. However, he still directly addressed the reader and kept referring to himself. I highlighted all the mistakes and emailed it back to him along with a link to a formal business writing guide.
I think the most annoying thing is when someone writes a well thought out paper, but the style is so radically different from the other parts that you need to go through word by word to make it flow.
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The editor-in-chief of our student newspaper (newly formed, or rather resurrected) has asked me to be the editor and I'm fairly sure it's because she knows that I can adapt informal writing to be more suitable for print but am not so great at actually writing articles. I'm really looking forwards to it actually; I just hope that I'm given a fair amount of flexibility in editing because frankly, most of the staff are doing courses that don't involve a whole lot of formal writing and I don't want to print a load of rubbish.
That said, I'm in awe of anyone who can write an article that doesn't sound like the love child of a Joanna Trollope novel and that Times article. I would be a terrible journalist.