Rawr. I'll start off by saying I know this guy pretty well at this point. This is the third time I've been his TA, and last time I was kind of there for multiple classes. As in, I only officially did the grading for one, but when he was going to be away for a week, he asked me to cover and give a presentation on properly formatting papers to another class, I accompanied his two classes that I wasn't officially TAing on a field trip, and I was heavily involved in keeping tabs on his research assistant. Generally, we've worked well together, with bouts of some irritating behavior. In all this time, his forum discussion assignments have been out of 10. And he's never said anything about skewing the grading system in any way. So for as long as I've worked with him, it's been 9-10=A, 8.5=B+, 8=B, and so on. Just as you would expect. Multiply the grade by 10 and you get the score out of 100%. Note that this particular class is a 5 week winter semester class, so grading has to be done quickly.
With this in mind, I've already graded the first forum discussion for this class with this system in mind. I gave 10's to students whose work was truly exceptional. 9-9.5 to students whose work was very good, but not quite on par with the best. 8.5 to students on the high end of B work, 8 to those on the low end, and so on. I entered those grades days ago. Students have seen them.
Well, today, I get an e-mail. Even though the class is basically done and the first round of grades have already been posted for students to view, he's changed his grading scale. 9-10 is still an A. But now 8-8.5 is a B+. Still, fine. I'm not going to quibble over half a letter grade. But where it gets really frustrating is now 6-7.5 is a B. 5 is a C+, 4 is a C, 2-3 is a D, and 0-1 is an F. This is drastically different than what I'd had in mind while grading the first assignments. There was a student I have a 6 to, which is probably the lowest grade I've ever given to a complete assignment. Usually, if all parts of the assignment have been submitted, I give at least a 7.5, or what in my mind has been a C. But this was truly one of the worst assignments I've ever seen, so I gave what I thought as a 60%, which would have been an F.
But now that's apparently a B.
But what frustrates me even more than the apparent adjustment of grades I already entered is now grades may be markedly lower than they were on the first assignment. Say for example the student who earned a 6 made significant improvements on the second forum discussion, but the work only merits a C. Am I supposed to give a lower grade even if the work is actually better, because the grading scale has changed somewhere in between the assignments being graded? What about the students I have 8's to because they were on the lower end of the B range? Do I give them a lower number grade even if they've maintained the same level of quality from one assignment to another? How do I justify that?
I'm just so frustrated. If I'd known that this time around he was going to change the grading scale, I would have graded the last assignments much differently. But not only did he wait until I'd finished grading, but he left it until after all the grades were posted to notify me. So now I can't change it, because if a student notices that what was an 8 has now dropped to a 6.5 or 7 or, worse, what was a 6 is now a 1 or 2, they'll be out for blood before I even have time to explain. I feel like no matter what I do, if I suddenly follow this scale I'll have a mutiny on my hands with my inbox exploding with angry emails. But, if I ignore it and follow the original scale out of a healthy sense of self-preservation, I'll get an e-mail from the professor wanting to know why I'm suddenly giving everyone what works out to be higher grades than I have in the past.
I planned to get a good chunk of grading done today, but now I'm frustrated and confused and, frankly, feeling a little stuck.
Has anyone else here experienced a professor drastically changing the grade scale after the class was underway and assignments had already been graded?
Kerena Kim got a reaction from aberrant in Biophysics grad program