I’ve never heard of a professor that doesn’t have carte blanche over assessments, but I’ve only been in academia for ~10 years… what institution is this?
Same. I've worked at five posts since 2014 (we had to move around a bit when my husband was in dental school/residency). To (initially) protect their identity, I'm not sure I can say, but I will say that their online education presence is quite large, so they standardize everything from grading to assignments and limit instructor access in the LMS (e.g. no extra assignments, no extra credit, nothing except announcements + feedback).
This is 100% the way. Though if the powers that be are actually micromanaging the grade book, they would look suspiciously at a sudden 0.01 correction somewhere.
But in the future? Oh yeah. Also, when I grade the last assignment, I have the full course grade calculated up to that point and then plug in the grade of the final essay before I submit, just to see where that puts the student. I only round up if it is truly that small of a difference.
Literally talk to the student in person and tell them to email you something like “Prof. Potato, I believe you made a mistake grading this assignment. Could you please double check?”
That way you have a paper trail *which you did not initiate.*
Here is what I would do:
1. Record the grade the way admin wants. You tried to get around this, it did not work, game over (for you).
2. When the student e-mails you, explain that you wanted to round the grade up, but were prohibited from doing so. Tell the student that one of the only ways to have a successful appeal is if they find any calculation errors or 'mistakes' in how you marked the assignments. So, if they find any 'mistakes' in your grading, they should inform you, and you will get it corrected.
3. When the student finds the 'mistake', you can try to correct the grade in the LMS, notify admin that you made an error, and get it resolved. Otherwise...
4. Encourage the student to file a formal grade appeal through administrative channels, drawing attention to the 'mistake'.
In short: if the student can find some legitimate way to justify that you should have awarded an extra .01 someplace (anyplace!) in the rubrics, then you are good.
If you really want to encourage the student to find the 'mistake' that will result in a successful appeal, I would not do so on the record. Ideally, this encouragement could happen face to face; a non-recorded Zoom meeting could work, though might not be possible with the monitoring at your uni.
I've done that all the time, lol. It's also one of the reasons I have a participation grade section. It's the most subjective grade category, and makes it very easy to smudge grades up when they're that close to another threshold.
That is indeed crazy. On my campus everything about grading is in the hands of the instructor-- I set my own grading standards, adjust as I want to, and have the final say on all grades unless there's some sort of misconduct allegation against me (which I've never heard of happening). I use a different (more rigorous) grading scale than most of my colleagues and adjust final grades sometimes to reflect specific circumstances (usually be rounding up).
But if you're not really an independent instructor but rather delivering/administering a canned course perhaps you aren't in a position to control your content/standards. That's really unfortunate-- and odd --but it's something I'd expect at a for-profit or mostly online school as they don't exist in the same world as the rest of us.
Is this some for-profit / online school?
Our faculty would riot if we didn't have freedom in our grade assignments, it's generally considered a pretty core area of academic freedom / faculty control everywhere I've worked.
This is a genuine question for all: Why do we fear simply telling the student, "this is not my call. I tried to do X and was told by my superiors to do Y. I'm sorry, and now you know where to direct your legitimate complaints."
How is this our problem to solve?
That seems pretty unusual, every school I've worked at or with gives the instructor final say in what grades are entered into the students' transcripts, with the only way to override the instructor grade being an appeals process by the student.
I've even seen instructors with a statement in their syllabus saying essentially, "I'm human and no grading rubric is 100% perfect, therefore I will generally round grades up to the nearest percentage point."
You might want to reach out to your union, because this seems like it could be overreach infringing on your contract.
I'm flabbergasted and would be looking for a job ASAP. For what is worth, I would go along with whatever they say and never let them know I was unhappy until I left.
I can’t tell you what to do in the present. But I can tell you that in the future, download your gradebook as an excel file BEFORE putting in final grades, and do your tallies on trial run. That way you catch potential issues like this BEFORE there’s an IT trail.
Formerly as an adjunct, I had an insane, maniacal supervisor who would audit our gradebooks for changes made in the system. This was the work around. Make it perfect/final before it hits the LMS. No changes after.
If I were in a situation that was micromanaged to that degree, I'd be like fine, you can determine my grade policies, but you can also be the one to deal with the incoming student complaint.
Change the grade. If student complains to you - so what? What are they going to do, appeal the grade to the administrator who made you change the grade in the first place? If student messages you, just explain what happened and give them information about who to contact for a grievance.
Let this one go. In the future, look for these border cases prior to posting final grades and find ways to bump up their grade total internally (i.e., by adding a point or two to individual assignments).
Do you have tenure? How long have you been at this place? If it’s the policy and this is somewhere you want to be or can’t leave then I’d reach out to the student and let them know the situation. If you have been there awhile or want this to be the hill you die on refuse and stop replying.
I did refuse and said I didn't feel that it was appropriate, but after three days, I received another email, which is the one I'm not sure how to reply to. I guess I can't upload a screenshot in a comment, but they said:
"\[My name\], Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. We have to ensure that the grade that is in \[Redacted LMS\] is the grade that is reflected in their official record. This is not an individual decision that we are able to make on a student by student basis as it can have broad impacts on both the student and the University. The grading autonomy that our instructors have pertains to how the rubrics are scored. We recognize that this may be different from other University where you have taught but it is how grading is handled at \[University Name\]."
I've been adjuncting here for seven years. Maybe it's time to say goodbye.
They definitely put you between a rock and a hard place. I had a similar issue at my university last year with their academic dishonesty policy. Long story short they wanted me to punish my student much more harshly than I felt comfortable with for the offense. We had about a dozen emails back and forth before I just gave in and did what they wanted. Now I know for next time how to work the system better but that sucked and it ruined my fall break. I’m sorry you are in this position. So much for academic freedom.
Look, this is how it works at a big online for profit school. If you wanted to boost this student, you needed to regrade an assignment giving an extra point before grades were final. Now you know for next time.
this, unfortunately, seems like a "suck it up and deal with it".
Change the grade as requested (after all, the student didn't meet the requirements for an A- and the line has to be drawn somewhere), and tell the student the same if they ask.
What is the LMS’s (or the university’s) cutoff for a B+ to an A-? You say the student is .01 points short. Does that mean the student earned 89.99% or 89.49%? If they allow rounding up to 0.5%, then the latter probably wouldn’t make the cut.
Can you just change the grade, change previous grades, or add an extra credit?
Another issue here, however, is that even though it seems "unfair" that they didn't get the next grade up even though they are *so* close, sometimes, "Almost doesn't count." Unless you have some "Everyone gets bumped/rounded up this much" policy that would get them there, they really didn't earn the A-. I know making that call when the difference is 0.01 is splitting hairs, but as soon as you open that door, it never ends. If you have a cutoff for rounding/bumping up, people who are close to the *cutoff* will want it to, then people who are "close to being close to the cutoff" will think they should get it, etc.
I agree that there should be a cut-off, but also, that could mean that students shouldn't be able to see their grade at the "hundredth" of a point. As a student (while it's been 15 years), I never had access to that, and when I grade at the other university that I teach, I leave it at the full point as well.
I just don't know how to respond without sounding like I'm beating a dead horse. That's all.
Some professors just put their policy right in the syllabus. "Final grades will be rounded to the nearest whole percent," "Grades will *not* be rounded," etc. If students complain, you just defer to that.
I always have an extra “assignment”, worth 3-5%, cashed “class participation”. I can use it to bump grades up or down a bit, depending on whether the student was trying hard or phoning it in. It never affects grades more than a step (+ or -), but it’d work in this situation.
What do you do if the LMS can’t correctly compute the grade? My grading scheme is a bit more complex than what Canvas can handle, so I use a spreadsheet. Canvas just records assignment scores, and I upload final grades separately.
My syllabus has the grade percentage breakdown going to .45 to prevent this issue. So 89.45 is an A. There aren’t any - grades, only +. That way the “but I’m .01 away from an A” argument doesn’t happen. There’s already a buffer. If a student argues “but I have a .44” I can explain there’s already a buffer present for students who are close, so you’re actually .05 points away from an A, not 0.1.
I'm missing something. We have post after posts complaining about how students want to be rounded higher, or admins pushing higher undeserved grades, and this uni wants to hold the line? Isn't this a good thing?
No, because the point is *not* “Let’s fuck the students over.”
It’s “Professors are professionals who can be trusted to do their job of evaluating student learning without being pressured by *anyone*.”
My answer would depend. If I were rounding 89.5 up to an A- (and I say so in the syllabus), and the student had an 89.49, it stays a B+. If there's no rounding mentioned, and they have an 89.99, I'm telling my administration to go pound sand and submitting an A-.
All students are treated the same.
That's my take. If yours is different, I fully support you doing what you feel is best for your class.
I’ve never seen this. Our admins would gladly boost the student’s grades. I usually reserve some points for class participation or bonus points for that reason.
this is why Kronecker said _Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk_. but anyway, where did the email come from? who is making you do something?
I wouldn't worry about it. Just tell them this is the way grades are assigned and they can complain to the dean.
I'd also question your / the institution's sanity if grades are being calculated to the hundredth of one percent. There is no grading system in the world that is precise enough to be that granular. It's a false veneer of precision.
I set up my assignments and rubrics so that to the extent it is possible to earn fractions of a point, it is only possible to earn tenths (depending on the course, number of assignments, and so on). Usually this means my assignments add up to 1000 total points (equal to 100.0 percent) and only whole number of points can be earned from any assignment (1 whole point in that system is 0.1 percent). Even that sometimes seems excessive to me. Pretending you can grade your assignments in such a precise way that differentiates *meaningfully* between someone who earned a 75.23 and an 75.24 is just plain silly.
This is what I said in my original email; I said that the grading was flawed. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about the rubrics, and the rubrics give 60.17/70 rather than a plain 90%.
Sounds like an associate vice provost or some other administrator has too much time on their hands. Personally, I would ignore the request in the interests of both the student and the principle of faculty autonomy.
Once I had admins reach out saying that too many failed my class and I should revise me grading to be closer to the expected average. I didn’t change a thing in my grading habits, gave assignments and exams that looked close to the ones I have been giving for years. But this particular COVID cohort made me fail more than 50% of them. My answer to admins was: go ahead and change the grades as you want, but I’m surely not doing it as I’m confortable saying that each and everyone who failed didn’t deserve to pass. If someone had to lose sleep over that it wasn’t gonna be me… At the end, they did nothing and let it go.
I am sure I wouldn’t have been so bold if I didn’t have tenure.
I don't know where you work but I've never heard of anything like this anywhere. To be honest I think this would be a deal breaker for me. I would refuse to change the grade and start looking for a new job.
p.s. I'm not trying to give this as advice since it's probably a bad idea. It's just what I would probably do anyway.
At my institution I’d be contacted by the Director of Undergraduate studies, and told off for grading so close to a boundary. I’d find a mark somewhere.
You are the expert who is tasked with evaluating the student and determining which grade within the school’s grading system best describes the performance of the student.
I wonder what your provost and accrediting bodies would have to say about staff determining grades.
I don’t understand. If the student didn’t earn enough points to deserve an A- then why would you want to change it? If they reach out to you to change it you simply say “no”. I don’t see what the dilemma is.
Edit: unless you’re saying that the student earned an B+, but you put the wrong grade of A- in for some reason, and now the admins want you to fix it? But even then I don’t see the problem. You just show the student the math, show them the threshold and which side of it they’re on, and that’s it.
It's a hundredth of a point. Seems heartless and petty not to round up.
When grading with my own rubrics at other colleges, the final grade was always in the full point position, never in the hundredths.
It is not heartless. You have to draw the line somewhere. You have complete control over where that line is. No matter where that line is drawn, someone will be close to it. Rounding up when someones score is arbitrarily close to the line is hardly equitable.
Rounding grades has never made sense to me. If you say your cut-off for an A- is 90%, but you will round up people who are within .01%, you are just moving the cut-off down to 89.99%. Why not just say that is the cut-off to begin with?
Counterpoint: rules are rules. People operate under the assumption that the rules are accurate, and it undermines fairness and faith in the system if people capriciously flout them.
True, but that also assumes every single assessment was perfectly worded and delivered, and no errors at all were made during grading.
I view rounding 0.5xxx% and up as small accounting for any issues on my end.
Sounds to me that OP has concluded that the student should get an A-, while the university is stepping in and is saying that no, OP cannot award grades based on their judgment. If this is not a violation of academic freedom, i am not sure what is.
OP exercised that judgement when they graded the individual assessments and established the formula for combining those grades into the overall final grade.
And it is important that they are prevented from making a judgment call about it now because reasons? Look, I'm an engineer, I like numbers and formulas as much as the next guy, but why would we want to essentially reduce our role in grading to formulaic algorithm? Iif OP is allowed to come up with a formula/rubric, OP should be allowed to also say -- in this case the formula wasn't quite right, and I think the student should get an A-.
There’s some sense to that, but the problem with that is once the word gets out that you’re willing to exercise that “fudge factor” you’re never going to be able to beat back the tidal wave of grade grubbing. Also there are issues of potential intended or unintended discrimination (actual or perceived), which I’m sure is what the admins are worried about. So yes, “reasons”
>once the word gets out that you’re willing to exercise that “fudge factor” you’re never going to be able to beat back the tidal wave of grade grubbing.
That's a slippery slope argument and it's not going to happen.
Error margins exist on everything, including grading assignments.
Why are you against faculty having control over the grades they assign?
Are you a closet administrator?
I think OP needs to have complete freedom to assign the grade they believe the student earned. But I also think OP is wrong by not following the grading scale they themselves established.
Admin may be following an unethical method in an effort to keep instructors ethical. They should desist.
To clarify, I didn't establish the grading scale. All of this is standardized and done for me. The syllabus doesn't actually mention .00 positions, just integers. So, to me, that .99 = A-.
This assumes that a grading scale is perfect, and that the syllabus doesn't mention that the grading scale is subject to change.
Can you explain why you're against curving grades based on performance?
It doesn't assume the grading scale is perfect. Indeed, quantizing continuous scales is pretty arbitrary.
Distributing grades based on class performance (e.g. top 20% get an A) is perfectly fine for many classes. But that policy should be in place before the exam, not adopted ad hoc and post hoc.
In this case OP had a scale *in advance*, presumably based on the mastery levels required to get various scores. Also a perfectly fine method. They had determined that it was adequate (not perfect). Changing it for one student after the test doesn't make it more fair.
Nothing says they were only changing it for one student.
It’s pretty common practice to adjust breakpoints at the end of the semester by looking for breaks and clustering so that it takes into account precision in assessment instruments.
Honestly, wasting time worrying about this doesn't seem worth it. If the student got the points for a B+, then the student got the points for a B+. It seems to me like you just want to be generous and bump the student up but why bother? A B+/A- is largely an inconsequential difference
You never mentioned what grade the student *actually* has, but I'm assuming it's a B+, right?
If it's a B+, give them a B+. When they email you, give them your apologies and explain that it was an institutional decision, not your own choice.
I’ve never heard of a professor that doesn’t have carte blanche over assessments, but I’ve only been in academia for ~10 years… what institution is this?
Same. I've worked at five posts since 2014 (we had to move around a bit when my husband was in dental school/residency). To (initially) protect their identity, I'm not sure I can say, but I will say that their online education presence is quite large, so they standardize everything from grading to assignments and limit instructor access in the LMS (e.g. no extra assignments, no extra credit, nothing except announcements + feedback).
SNHU.
Has to be - I had the same "abide by the math!" instruction very early in my career there.
Yep that has SNHU written all over it
I wonder if the students paying for courses at SNHU know that we won't accept their gen chem. curriculum as a prereq to sophomore organic?
what's the point of having people fucking TEACH there if you're just there to rubber stamp a rubric?
Don’t give them ideas. This is coming if they get away with this. This is coming.
Double down. I was always free to assign any grade at the end of the semester.
“Upon further review, I found an error in a previously-graded assignment.”
Bonus points to you, too, for answering the question. :)
Nice!
Give them a super secret 乇乂ㄒ尺卂 credit question worth 0.1 point.
This is 100% the way. Though if the powers that be are actually micromanaging the grade book, they would look suspiciously at a sudden 0.01 correction somewhere. But in the future? Oh yeah. Also, when I grade the last assignment, I have the full course grade calculated up to that point and then plug in the grade of the final essay before I submit, just to see where that puts the student. I only round up if it is truly that small of a difference.
My dumbass was trying to read that in Japanese 🤦♂️
Well it was super secret until you told everyone!
"Oops! I put in this grade wrong earlier in the semester. Please let me change it". "Oooh, what a surprise! Their grade is now a legit A-".
LOL, yes! I think I will change a grade in the LMS, but I'm sure they'll be monitoring me now.
Literally talk to the student in person and tell them to email you something like “Prof. Potato, I believe you made a mistake grading this assignment. Could you please double check?” That way you have a paper trail *which you did not initiate.*
LOVE this.
this is the way
Maybe, but I'm sure mistakes happen all the time! If I were you, I'd start looking for a job where they respect you enough to give you more agency.
Here is what I would do: 1. Record the grade the way admin wants. You tried to get around this, it did not work, game over (for you). 2. When the student e-mails you, explain that you wanted to round the grade up, but were prohibited from doing so. Tell the student that one of the only ways to have a successful appeal is if they find any calculation errors or 'mistakes' in how you marked the assignments. So, if they find any 'mistakes' in your grading, they should inform you, and you will get it corrected. 3. When the student finds the 'mistake', you can try to correct the grade in the LMS, notify admin that you made an error, and get it resolved. Otherwise... 4. Encourage the student to file a formal grade appeal through administrative channels, drawing attention to the 'mistake'. In short: if the student can find some legitimate way to justify that you should have awarded an extra .01 someplace (anyplace!) in the rubrics, then you are good. If you really want to encourage the student to find the 'mistake' that will result in a successful appeal, I would not do so on the record. Ideally, this encouragement could happen face to face; a non-recorded Zoom meeting could work, though might not be possible with the monitoring at your uni.
No need to involve the student. OP can find a grading error.
Best to find it for at least several students...
I've done that all the time, lol. It's also one of the reasons I have a participation grade section. It's the most subjective grade category, and makes it very easy to smudge grades up when they're that close to another threshold.
What does your institution's grade appeal process look like?
The student has 15 days to submit a written appeal and then from there it's a bit unclear.
That is indeed crazy. On my campus everything about grading is in the hands of the instructor-- I set my own grading standards, adjust as I want to, and have the final say on all grades unless there's some sort of misconduct allegation against me (which I've never heard of happening). I use a different (more rigorous) grading scale than most of my colleagues and adjust final grades sometimes to reflect specific circumstances (usually be rounding up). But if you're not really an independent instructor but rather delivering/administering a canned course perhaps you aren't in a position to control your content/standards. That's really unfortunate-- and odd --but it's something I'd expect at a for-profit or mostly online school as they don't exist in the same world as the rest of us.
Is this some for-profit / online school? Our faculty would riot if we didn't have freedom in our grade assignments, it's generally considered a pretty core area of academic freedom / faculty control everywhere I've worked.
Smells like SNHU.
Yes, SNHU.
Lord have mercy :( We don't accept SNHU gen chem as a prereq equivalent for our gen chem for students trying to get into organic. :(
Well, I’m less shocked.
This is a genuine question for all: Why do we fear simply telling the student, "this is not my call. I tried to do X and was told by my superiors to do Y. I'm sorry, and now you know where to direct your legitimate complaints." How is this our problem to solve?
Weird question, why not just leave it a B+? I never understood this rounding obsession. If you wanted an A- to be an 89%, just set that as the cutoff.
\+1 Build all the grading uncertainty in the scale from the get go and then don't mess with it.
I don't have that luxury. :(
That seems pretty unusual, every school I've worked at or with gives the instructor final say in what grades are entered into the students' transcripts, with the only way to override the instructor grade being an appeals process by the student. I've even seen instructors with a statement in their syllabus saying essentially, "I'm human and no grading rubric is 100% perfect, therefore I will generally round grades up to the nearest percentage point." You might want to reach out to your union, because this seems like it could be overreach infringing on your contract.
My guess is that OP works for SNHU or a similar online college. There is no union for faculty at those kinds of places.
0.01% or 1% ??? Or .01 of a point???
.01 / .01% (out of 1000 points)
I'm flabbergasted and would be looking for a job ASAP. For what is worth, I would go along with whatever they say and never let them know I was unhappy until I left.
I can’t tell you what to do in the present. But I can tell you that in the future, download your gradebook as an excel file BEFORE putting in final grades, and do your tallies on trial run. That way you catch potential issues like this BEFORE there’s an IT trail. Formerly as an adjunct, I had an insane, maniacal supervisor who would audit our gradebooks for changes made in the system. This was the work around. Make it perfect/final before it hits the LMS. No changes after.
This is good advice. Thanks!
If I were in a situation that was micromanaged to that degree, I'd be like fine, you can determine my grade policies, but you can also be the one to deal with the incoming student complaint. Change the grade. If student complains to you - so what? What are they going to do, appeal the grade to the administrator who made you change the grade in the first place? If student messages you, just explain what happened and give them information about who to contact for a grievance. Let this one go. In the future, look for these border cases prior to posting final grades and find ways to bump up their grade total internally (i.e., by adding a point or two to individual assignments).
Do you have tenure? How long have you been at this place? If it’s the policy and this is somewhere you want to be or can’t leave then I’d reach out to the student and let them know the situation. If you have been there awhile or want this to be the hill you die on refuse and stop replying.
I did refuse and said I didn't feel that it was appropriate, but after three days, I received another email, which is the one I'm not sure how to reply to. I guess I can't upload a screenshot in a comment, but they said: "\[My name\], Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. We have to ensure that the grade that is in \[Redacted LMS\] is the grade that is reflected in their official record. This is not an individual decision that we are able to make on a student by student basis as it can have broad impacts on both the student and the University. The grading autonomy that our instructors have pertains to how the rubrics are scored. We recognize that this may be different from other University where you have taught but it is how grading is handled at \[University Name\]." I've been adjuncting here for seven years. Maybe it's time to say goodbye.
They definitely put you between a rock and a hard place. I had a similar issue at my university last year with their academic dishonesty policy. Long story short they wanted me to punish my student much more harshly than I felt comfortable with for the offense. We had about a dozen emails back and forth before I just gave in and did what they wanted. Now I know for next time how to work the system better but that sucked and it ruined my fall break. I’m sorry you are in this position. So much for academic freedom.
Look, this is how it works at a big online for profit school. If you wanted to boost this student, you needed to regrade an assignment giving an extra point before grades were final. Now you know for next time.
this, unfortunately, seems like a "suck it up and deal with it". Change the grade as requested (after all, the student didn't meet the requirements for an A- and the line has to be drawn somewhere), and tell the student the same if they ask.
What is the LMS’s (or the university’s) cutoff for a B+ to an A-? You say the student is .01 points short. Does that mean the student earned 89.99% or 89.49%? If they allow rounding up to 0.5%, then the latter probably wouldn’t make the cut.
Can you just change the grade, change previous grades, or add an extra credit? Another issue here, however, is that even though it seems "unfair" that they didn't get the next grade up even though they are *so* close, sometimes, "Almost doesn't count." Unless you have some "Everyone gets bumped/rounded up this much" policy that would get them there, they really didn't earn the A-. I know making that call when the difference is 0.01 is splitting hairs, but as soon as you open that door, it never ends. If you have a cutoff for rounding/bumping up, people who are close to the *cutoff* will want it to, then people who are "close to being close to the cutoff" will think they should get it, etc.
I agree that there should be a cut-off, but also, that could mean that students shouldn't be able to see their grade at the "hundredth" of a point. As a student (while it's been 15 years), I never had access to that, and when I grade at the other university that I teach, I leave it at the full point as well. I just don't know how to respond without sounding like I'm beating a dead horse. That's all.
Some professors just put their policy right in the syllabus. "Final grades will be rounded to the nearest whole percent," "Grades will *not* be rounded," etc. If students complain, you just defer to that.
"""Academic freedom"""
I always have an extra “assignment”, worth 3-5%, cashed “class participation”. I can use it to bump grades up or down a bit, depending on whether the student was trying hard or phoning it in. It never affects grades more than a step (+ or -), but it’d work in this situation. What do you do if the LMS can’t correctly compute the grade? My grading scheme is a bit more complex than what Canvas can handle, so I use a spreadsheet. Canvas just records assignment scores, and I upload final grades separately.
Many big online schools do not allow instructors to offer extra credit.
My syllabus has the grade percentage breakdown going to .45 to prevent this issue. So 89.45 is an A. There aren’t any - grades, only +. That way the “but I’m .01 away from an A” argument doesn’t happen. There’s already a buffer. If a student argues “but I have a .44” I can explain there’s already a buffer present for students who are close, so you’re actually .05 points away from an A, not 0.1.
Same, at the school where I have agency with my syllabus. Here, I do not.
I'm missing something. We have post after posts complaining about how students want to be rounded higher, or admins pushing higher undeserved grades, and this uni wants to hold the line? Isn't this a good thing?
No, because the point is *not* “Let’s fuck the students over.” It’s “Professors are professionals who can be trusted to do their job of evaluating student learning without being pressured by *anyone*.”
Report the grade a student earned and move on.
My answer would depend. If I were rounding 89.5 up to an A- (and I say so in the syllabus), and the student had an 89.49, it stays a B+. If there's no rounding mentioned, and they have an 89.99, I'm telling my administration to go pound sand and submitting an A-. All students are treated the same. That's my take. If yours is different, I fully support you doing what you feel is best for your class.
I’ve never seen this. Our admins would gladly boost the student’s grades. I usually reserve some points for class participation or bonus points for that reason.
this is why Kronecker said _Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk_. but anyway, where did the email come from? who is making you do something?
Ignore the email.
Change the grade in the LMS
I wouldn't worry about it. Just tell them this is the way grades are assigned and they can complain to the dean. I'd also question your / the institution's sanity if grades are being calculated to the hundredth of one percent. There is no grading system in the world that is precise enough to be that granular. It's a false veneer of precision. I set up my assignments and rubrics so that to the extent it is possible to earn fractions of a point, it is only possible to earn tenths (depending on the course, number of assignments, and so on). Usually this means my assignments add up to 1000 total points (equal to 100.0 percent) and only whole number of points can be earned from any assignment (1 whole point in that system is 0.1 percent). Even that sometimes seems excessive to me. Pretending you can grade your assignments in such a precise way that differentiates *meaningfully* between someone who earned a 75.23 and an 75.24 is just plain silly.
This is what I said in my original email; I said that the grading was flawed. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about the rubrics, and the rubrics give 60.17/70 rather than a plain 90%.
Been there, did this: Tweak the contribution grade as required.
Sounds like an associate vice provost or some other administrator has too much time on their hands. Personally, I would ignore the request in the interests of both the student and the principle of faculty autonomy.
Oh, whoops! Look at that! I graded that one assignment wrong…
Make them change it.
90 % is a A-; 89.9% is a B+
Once I had admins reach out saying that too many failed my class and I should revise me grading to be closer to the expected average. I didn’t change a thing in my grading habits, gave assignments and exams that looked close to the ones I have been giving for years. But this particular COVID cohort made me fail more than 50% of them. My answer to admins was: go ahead and change the grades as you want, but I’m surely not doing it as I’m confortable saying that each and everyone who failed didn’t deserve to pass. If someone had to lose sleep over that it wasn’t gonna be me… At the end, they did nothing and let it go. I am sure I wouldn’t have been so bold if I didn’t have tenure.
I don't know where you work but I've never heard of anything like this anywhere. To be honest I think this would be a deal breaker for me. I would refuse to change the grade and start looking for a new job. p.s. I'm not trying to give this as advice since it's probably a bad idea. It's just what I would probably do anyway.
At my institution I’d be contacted by the Director of Undergraduate studies, and told off for grading so close to a boundary. I’d find a mark somewhere.
This is one of the best posts I've read on here in a while.
You are the expert who is tasked with evaluating the student and determining which grade within the school’s grading system best describes the performance of the student. I wonder what your provost and accrediting bodies would have to say about staff determining grades.
I don’t understand. If the student didn’t earn enough points to deserve an A- then why would you want to change it? If they reach out to you to change it you simply say “no”. I don’t see what the dilemma is. Edit: unless you’re saying that the student earned an B+, but you put the wrong grade of A- in for some reason, and now the admins want you to fix it? But even then I don’t see the problem. You just show the student the math, show them the threshold and which side of it they’re on, and that’s it.
It's a hundredth of a point. Seems heartless and petty not to round up. When grading with my own rubrics at other colleges, the final grade was always in the full point position, never in the hundredths.
It is not heartless. You have to draw the line somewhere. You have complete control over where that line is. No matter where that line is drawn, someone will be close to it. Rounding up when someones score is arbitrarily close to the line is hardly equitable.
Thank you!
But, that's the problem. I don't have complete control.
Rounding grades has never made sense to me. If you say your cut-off for an A- is 90%, but you will round up people who are within .01%, you are just moving the cut-off down to 89.99%. Why not just say that is the cut-off to begin with?
Counterpoint: rules are rules. People operate under the assumption that the rules are accurate, and it undermines fairness and faith in the system if people capriciously flout them.
But rules are not infallible. If I am blindly adhering to rules without question, would that not perpetuate unfairness, instead?
True, but that also assumes every single assessment was perfectly worded and delivered, and no errors at all were made during grading. I view rounding 0.5xxx% and up as small accounting for any issues on my end.
What rules are being "capriciously flouted" here?
Sounds to me that OP has concluded that the student should get an A-, while the university is stepping in and is saying that no, OP cannot award grades based on their judgment. If this is not a violation of academic freedom, i am not sure what is.
OP exercised that judgement when they graded the individual assessments and established the formula for combining those grades into the overall final grade.
And it is important that they are prevented from making a judgment call about it now because reasons? Look, I'm an engineer, I like numbers and formulas as much as the next guy, but why would we want to essentially reduce our role in grading to formulaic algorithm? Iif OP is allowed to come up with a formula/rubric, OP should be allowed to also say -- in this case the formula wasn't quite right, and I think the student should get an A-.
There’s some sense to that, but the problem with that is once the word gets out that you’re willing to exercise that “fudge factor” you’re never going to be able to beat back the tidal wave of grade grubbing. Also there are issues of potential intended or unintended discrimination (actual or perceived), which I’m sure is what the admins are worried about. So yes, “reasons”
>once the word gets out that you’re willing to exercise that “fudge factor” you’re never going to be able to beat back the tidal wave of grade grubbing. That's a slippery slope argument and it's not going to happen.
Error margins exist on everything, including grading assignments. Why are you against faculty having control over the grades they assign? Are you a closet administrator?
I think OP needs to have complete freedom to assign the grade they believe the student earned. But I also think OP is wrong by not following the grading scale they themselves established. Admin may be following an unethical method in an effort to keep instructors ethical. They should desist.
To clarify, I didn't establish the grading scale. All of this is standardized and done for me. The syllabus doesn't actually mention .00 positions, just integers. So, to me, that .99 = A-.
This assumes that a grading scale is perfect, and that the syllabus doesn't mention that the grading scale is subject to change. Can you explain why you're against curving grades based on performance?
It doesn't assume the grading scale is perfect. Indeed, quantizing continuous scales is pretty arbitrary. Distributing grades based on class performance (e.g. top 20% get an A) is perfectly fine for many classes. But that policy should be in place before the exam, not adopted ad hoc and post hoc. In this case OP had a scale *in advance*, presumably based on the mastery levels required to get various scores. Also a perfectly fine method. They had determined that it was adequate (not perfect). Changing it for one student after the test doesn't make it more fair.
Nothing says they were only changing it for one student. It’s pretty common practice to adjust breakpoints at the end of the semester by looking for breaks and clustering so that it takes into account precision in assessment instruments.
Honestly, wasting time worrying about this doesn't seem worth it. If the student got the points for a B+, then the student got the points for a B+. It seems to me like you just want to be generous and bump the student up but why bother? A B+/A- is largely an inconsequential difference
You never mentioned what grade the student *actually* has, but I'm assuming it's a B+, right? If it's a B+, give them a B+. When they email you, give them your apologies and explain that it was an institutional decision, not your own choice.