Open letter to my students:
Congratulations! We have all survived yet another semester. Ring out, wild bells! Yet for some, this will be an anxious time, for you're awaiting your grades. You're wondering why I haven't sent back your papers yet, or why the final paper & exam categories haven't been filled in. You'd also wonder about the hour-long gap between me finishing grading and posting the final grades, if only you knew about it.
So here's a little secret, something that many of us proffies do for our undergrads that you may not know about: If you've shown consistent effort and/or improvement over the semester, we spend that extra hour or so scrounging around the gradebook, looking for somewhere to find you just one more point if it will push you into the next-highest grade levels. Because we recognize that numbers don't tell the whole story, and that a gradebook calculated down to the quarter-point out of 100 doesn't weight for improvement or one little silly mistake on a quiz because you were tired but you remembered walking out the door...
Because mostly, though it may not seem like it, we really like you, and we're totally on your team. And we want you to have a good summer.
Now: can we go out and play?
2 comments:
That little dance between the stated grade weights and the grade we want to give. And yes, it's always up...
So very true!
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