Wednesday, December 17, 2014

as your ship is going down, i'll stand by and watch you drown

UGH. so i'm gonna start this by saying that i realize that i am maybe overreacting a little bit because of hormones and stuff, but ugh.

if you have read my blog for any length of time, you probably know that i am a GTA for the computer forensics program at my school, a bittersweet job. while i have met some really great people through this job, there have also been times when i wanted to smash my fist through the computer screen just so that i could stop reading the crap i was forced to read. i love to help people, which i get to do with this, but on the flip side there are the students that just refuse to be helped. they are frustrating.

and then there are the jerks. (jerks is not the word that i have been complaining about to my husband for the last fifteen minutes, but i'm still unsure what my cussing policy is for this blog. i should probably figure it out.) (for some basic background information: this past semester, i graded the assignments for three different courses and then gave general advice and help for the rest of the program.)

so i just got an email a little bit ago from one of the professors that i TA for asking about clarification about points that i deducted from a student who was complaining about his final grade. so i read through the emails that the student sent and UGH.

the first email starts by insulting the person who graded the final exam. you could tell that he thought i graded the exams because he said that the grader was clearly "following a script," a description he used for me in later emails. he also mentioned that his "homework was graded wrong." then there were a couple of emails back and forth that showed the student to be passive-aggressive and condescending but are not worth quoting because they do not refer to me again. when other topics seem exhausted, though, he comes back to me and how i "unjustly deducted" points because i can't "think outside the script" and i count his right answers as wrong because i don't agree with them. he goes on to explain how he is an awesome professional that can do no wrong and it is frustrating to do all this work and have "an inexperience students [sic] grade [his] work poorly because he/she does not know the material." oh boo hoo.

firrrst of all, i deducted points (literally half a point two times) because your answers were wrong. the information in them was right, but as an answer to that specific question? wrong. second of all, i have had several students email me/come talk to me after i post grades to discuss their grades and question my decisions. i welcome these emails. i sometimes give points back. i am always fair. if you don't care enough to bring up your concerns until after you fail to get the grade you want, then you don't deserve the points in my opinion. and third of all, i know the effing material. jerk.

what i want to do is email the student, tell him he can take his GPA that "does not need padding" and all of his experience and shove it, let him know that i hope he fails and that trying to blame your grade on someone else (who literally deducted 3 points from you all semester) is kind of ridiculous. of course, i know that this is immature and unprofessional and just basically wrong, but uggghhh. i'm so annoyed.

(part of me is saying that posting this is unprofessional and wrong, too, but i read through it a zillion times and there is no way to tell which student out of the hundred some i am talking about and so that makes it okay, right? plus, i need to vent. and i think my husband is tired of listening to me repeat the same things four hundred times.)

*Ha Ha You're Dead - Greenday

4 comments:

  1. brat.
    also, i know the feeling of the last post. there are a ton of ambulance stories i wish i could tell.

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    1. i used to read this blog about an ambulance driver, and i'm still not entirely sure if the stories were true, but it was all about the people he met on his drives and the things he saw. he said that they were all true but with changed names and locations. maybe you could do that? it is a fuzzy line, though, and ambulance stories are different and more serious than student emails, but they're also a lot more interesting.

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  2. anonymous hippopotamusDecember 31, 2014 at 1:50 PM

    I would have totally emailed him, but then you might get fired....still, it would be totally worth it.

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    1. satisfying, but i wouldn't say totally worth it. paycheck over pettiness, sadly.

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