Department Chair “recommended” we all avoid giving C- so as to reduce grade appeals, so a D+ or C became the new C- (depending on rounding).

The following semester, DC “recommended” we all avoid C- and D+.

I think he just didn’t get it.

He needed to find a way to toss out the lame grade appeals before they arrived. Making the unhappy brats argue why their grade was wrong would have been a 1st step: All appeals based on “Professor X was mean!” could be tossed out immediately.

It would have saved me from a very demeaning grade appeal meeting where 2 other instructors forced me to raise grades because they thought I was too strict (even though the vast majority of the other students passed with flying colours despite my unreasonable expectations that students follow instructions, do the assignment as instructed, and submit them on time).

My last graduate-level thermodynamics course included constructing a materials properties table, using fundamental relations and various equations to put it all together, and requiring a moderately complex sequence of equations that could only be done by computer. A week after it was turned in, the professor sternly told us all how disappointed he was in some of the projects. Turns out two students had created the exact same custom computer code, right down to comments. In addition, six other students had methodologies or results so similar as to be “highly suspicious.” (I got some unexpectedly high grades on this and other assignments in the class, which leads me to suspect there was quite a lot of “collaboration” leading to F’s… including the take-home final exam.)

It’s no wonder falsification of research data and plagiarism is so rampant in the professional world if students think they can get away with it in school. I don’t think there’s truly that much more responsibility among graduate students — you’ve only weeded out the “worst” undergraduate offenders because they presumably didn’t want to (or weren’t able to) pursue a graduate degree.

I had a student like that. I suggested he take it up with the chair. Same student would critique my lecture outlines during lectures. Not a way to gain the benefit of the doubt, dude.

A while back I stopped using +/- in graduate classes (physical sciences). I expect a lot of synthesis and application of principles to novel material and am less interested in “correct” answers than in rigorous thinking. In this context, those shades of grey +/- seem too subjective to be meaningful.

I once gave extra points inadvertently to an entire class (upper division undergraduates), enough to boost some grades from – to +. “Gee, they didn’t seem to be this strong a group,” I thought, as I was submitting the grades online. It was the end of the term and I was ready to be done so I didn’t ponder it too deeply. I think I discovered the error when a student mentioned in passing that a peer was surprised by her grade. I guess if I’m going to make mistakes, that’s the kind I’d prefer to make.

The grading system I have to work with now has + grades but no – grades, which I think is pretty silly. And there’s no A+ either.

I actually had a student complain about a D grade, arguing that by his math it should have been a D+. He was really fighting for those precious GPA points; he was a senior and trying to meet the minimum requirement for graduation. On the flip side, I had a student who I think it still miffed with me for giving him an A- in a US survey course. It was the only grade below and A he got in four years.

As for the retake policy, last year when I chaired our university’s chief academic policy committee we considered a proposal to allow retakes for everything below a C. This was favored by some of the professional programs that had a C minimum requirement to proceed from one course in a sequence to the next. Because these programs are prized, our administration went a bit haywire, arguing that the policy needed to be changed post-haste. Once I pointed out that such a change would mean that the lowest grade students would ever have to live with was an “average” grade, and thus could heighten the “problem” of grade inflation, the storm quieted down.

This reminds me of an old Peanuts cartoon that came out in the dark ages when I was in college (punch cards for the computers time). In it one of the characters got a Z-, and said, “That’s not a grade, that’s an insult.”

I’ve never had a grade appeal at Baa Ram U., although I’m pretty sure it’s not because I’m an easy grader. I would actually welcome a few since it would indicate that students cared about their grades. So many seem to just take Cs and Ds (or even Fs) as a matter of course.

Here, we assign percentage grades so students don’t automatically get enraged at a D+ in general. It’s the 59 in particular that will drive them nuts — why are we so mean as to not bump them up the one percentage point? (The same goes for 69 and 79, so much so that it’s a department directive to really think hard before assigning such a mark because you’re pretty much guaranteed to receive an appeal.)