I don't want to be a complainer
October 26, 2010 4:51 PM
I am getting really frustrated with my flaky chemistry professor. I don't want to complain about her mistakes to the Dean because I think she's a nice person and has some life circumstances I wouldn't wish on anyone (illness of her own and single caregiver for extremely ill and challenged child). How do I get over my frustration with her, stop resenting her, and also stop feeling upset and anxious when I study?
I am a non-traditional student at a local community college who is fulfilling coursework for a doctoral program. I took chemistry before, but because my coursework is from many years ago, I am required to take it again.
I have several complaints about this professor. In the beginning, she was extremely discouraging because I hadn't taken a "Chemistry for Non-Majors" course that the department highly recommends. She kept saying to everyone that anyone who hadn't taken it would probably fail the course or get a C at best. On our first exam, I studied hard and got a perfect paper. So now my stock is up. But some people didn't do well. They were the ones who used took notes during class in which she repeatedly made mistakes (she actually wrote hydroxide as a cation among other things, like getting the charge value of the electron way wrong) and solved problems wrong. When we were going over answers to one of our quizzes, it turned out she hadn't produced an answer key and was trying to figure out the answer in her head. She got them mostly wrong ("It's A....no wait...D...wait...yes, D").
Recently, she handed a lab report back where she took off half the points because she claimed that I had not done the calculations. I flipped open the report and pointed out to here that they were right there and she'd corrected them. She also said I was missing two labs and I opened up my folder and said, "No, look, you already marked them."
She does this constantly. I stopped taking notes in class because I realized it was just a waste of paper and she got most things wrong or explained them incorrectly.
I took an exam yesterday, and while she put down a few "charity questions" from the quizzes, there were a lot of problems I didn't know exactly how to solve. They looked like they were copied from a different textbook and we had no experience solving them. She justified this by saying that the final exam would have hard questions that required a higher level of analysis than we were used to. I had studied my hw questions, practice problems in the extremely expensive, customized version of the textbook, and previous quizzes, assuming that the questions would be similar. They weren't. They were a hodgepodge of questions that were very different from quizzes and the homework, and the right answers were often off by a few tenths, even though all the data was given (molar masses, equations, etc) and we used calculators. When I asked her about this, she said, "I got the questions from a test pool and noticed that a lot of them had bad calculations." Um, okay. She also blew through the past two chapters because she was notified that the second exam of the class needed to be administered by a certain date (yesterday).
I take school seriously. I'm a working adult. This isn't a joke for me, it's very important and I spend a lot of time on it. She won't let me see her gradebook to make sure she's recorded all my grades correctly so far. Midterm grades were due yesterday and when I asked her about them, she was dismissive and said it didn't really matter, and she wanted to factor in a bunch of other things like attendance and homework, etc. So she's not letting me see where I am, according to her, and I'm pretty certain she's probably misrecorded a bunch of things.
I need to keep a cool head about all this and stay the course, and do well in this class without feeling unhappy about her. I've lost confidence in her ability to teach well. I asked her for help a few times and she showed me the wrong way to do the problem, so I know she can't be trusted as a teacher (though that could be that her English is pretty bad and I misunderstood what she was saying). I saw her trying to do a problem on the board when someone asked about it, and she stared at it like she didn't know how to solve it, raised her chalk, lowered it, and then turned around and said, "This is just problem solving. If you're having trouble with this, you should go to the tutoring center. I'm not going to spend time on it."
I'm going to get a different chemistry professor for the second semester, but I really hate her as a teacher. At the end of the semester, the final will be set and administered by the department. There are no reviews, no looking at previous year's exams, nothing. She said that the highest grade any of her students ever got on the final were B's and that these were students who had taken chemistry before and needed to retake it because their home countries' credits didn't transfer in.
I'm taking another lab science course and the teacher is very organized and meticulous in lecture and lab, and with grading. This grade is particularly important and this class is very important. I hate her poor teaching ability, I hate that she makes me dread the final exam and tells us we'll all probably do badly and it will be hard for us, I hate her tests, her flakiness, and I feel so bad that I think she's a terrible teacher because she means well and is a really nice person, she probably needs the money from this job and the health insurance, but has terrible focus and is just a flake.
So, how do I stop feeling upset and just concentrate on learning the material? How do I stop dreading the final exam that she pretty much told us all that we would end up doing badly on? How do I regain my sense of confidence and feel like I have control over how well I do in this class?
I am a non-traditional student at a local community college who is fulfilling coursework for a doctoral program. I took chemistry before, but because my coursework is from many years ago, I am required to take it again.
I have several complaints about this professor. In the beginning, she was extremely discouraging because I hadn't taken a "Chemistry for Non-Majors" course that the department highly recommends. She kept saying to everyone that anyone who hadn't taken it would probably fail the course or get a C at best. On our first exam, I studied hard and got a perfect paper. So now my stock is up. But some people didn't do well. They were the ones who used took notes during class in which she repeatedly made mistakes (she actually wrote hydroxide as a cation among other things, like getting the charge value of the electron way wrong) and solved problems wrong. When we were going over answers to one of our quizzes, it turned out she hadn't produced an answer key and was trying to figure out the answer in her head. She got them mostly wrong ("It's A....no wait...D...wait...yes, D").
Recently, she handed a lab report back where she took off half the points because she claimed that I had not done the calculations. I flipped open the report and pointed out to here that they were right there and she'd corrected them. She also said I was missing two labs and I opened up my folder and said, "No, look, you already marked them."
She does this constantly. I stopped taking notes in class because I realized it was just a waste of paper and she got most things wrong or explained them incorrectly.
I took an exam yesterday, and while she put down a few "charity questions" from the quizzes, there were a lot of problems I didn't know exactly how to solve. They looked like they were copied from a different textbook and we had no experience solving them. She justified this by saying that the final exam would have hard questions that required a higher level of analysis than we were used to. I had studied my hw questions, practice problems in the extremely expensive, customized version of the textbook, and previous quizzes, assuming that the questions would be similar. They weren't. They were a hodgepodge of questions that were very different from quizzes and the homework, and the right answers were often off by a few tenths, even though all the data was given (molar masses, equations, etc) and we used calculators. When I asked her about this, she said, "I got the questions from a test pool and noticed that a lot of them had bad calculations." Um, okay. She also blew through the past two chapters because she was notified that the second exam of the class needed to be administered by a certain date (yesterday).
I take school seriously. I'm a working adult. This isn't a joke for me, it's very important and I spend a lot of time on it. She won't let me see her gradebook to make sure she's recorded all my grades correctly so far. Midterm grades were due yesterday and when I asked her about them, she was dismissive and said it didn't really matter, and she wanted to factor in a bunch of other things like attendance and homework, etc. So she's not letting me see where I am, according to her, and I'm pretty certain she's probably misrecorded a bunch of things.
I need to keep a cool head about all this and stay the course, and do well in this class without feeling unhappy about her. I've lost confidence in her ability to teach well. I asked her for help a few times and she showed me the wrong way to do the problem, so I know she can't be trusted as a teacher (though that could be that her English is pretty bad and I misunderstood what she was saying). I saw her trying to do a problem on the board when someone asked about it, and she stared at it like she didn't know how to solve it, raised her chalk, lowered it, and then turned around and said, "This is just problem solving. If you're having trouble with this, you should go to the tutoring center. I'm not going to spend time on it."
I'm going to get a different chemistry professor for the second semester, but I really hate her as a teacher. At the end of the semester, the final will be set and administered by the department. There are no reviews, no looking at previous year's exams, nothing. She said that the highest grade any of her students ever got on the final were B's and that these were students who had taken chemistry before and needed to retake it because their home countries' credits didn't transfer in.
I'm taking another lab science course and the teacher is very organized and meticulous in lecture and lab, and with grading. This grade is particularly important and this class is very important. I hate her poor teaching ability, I hate that she makes me dread the final exam and tells us we'll all probably do badly and it will be hard for us, I hate her tests, her flakiness, and I feel so bad that I think she's a terrible teacher because she means well and is a really nice person, she probably needs the money from this job and the health insurance, but has terrible focus and is just a flake.
So, how do I stop feeling upset and just concentrate on learning the material? How do I stop dreading the final exam that she pretty much told us all that we would end up doing badly on? How do I regain my sense of confidence and feel like I have control over how well I do in this class?
If the department administers the exam, does that mean someone besides her grades it? If so, that is good for you.
How much does the final exam count towards your grade? The more the better. Focus on studying for the exam based on her syllabus rather than what she teaches.
This is a difficult situation. I sympathize with you. You have legitimate complaints and you would not be out of line to raise them with the appropriate administrator.
Start with your academic advisor. Next would be the department chair. Dean's office is definitely not the place to start, at least in the four year college world. Someone who knows about community colleges is bound to comment in this thread.
How much has your course grade actually suffered so far? Has she changed your grades when you pointed out mistakes, and do those grades count for a lot?
If I were in your shoes, I might be inclined just to tough it out, because now that I see the other side I'm not sure what an administrator could step in and fix, regardless of her personal problems. On the other hand the department needs to know that the class is being run so poorly.
posted by vincele at 5:08 PM on October 26, 2010
How much does the final exam count towards your grade? The more the better. Focus on studying for the exam based on her syllabus rather than what she teaches.
This is a difficult situation. I sympathize with you. You have legitimate complaints and you would not be out of line to raise them with the appropriate administrator.
Start with your academic advisor. Next would be the department chair. Dean's office is definitely not the place to start, at least in the four year college world. Someone who knows about community colleges is bound to comment in this thread.
How much has your course grade actually suffered so far? Has she changed your grades when you pointed out mistakes, and do those grades count for a lot?
If I were in your shoes, I might be inclined just to tough it out, because now that I see the other side I'm not sure what an administrator could step in and fix, regardless of her personal problems. On the other hand the department needs to know that the class is being run so poorly.
posted by vincele at 5:08 PM on October 26, 2010
If this is an intro course, is there any chance there might be another section you could transfer into, pleading changes in work schedule, or whatever? Amtho's suggestion of dropping the course is solid, but it does sound as though it's probably too late in the semester for this.
With that said, it sounds as though you've got the capacity to master the material by yourself, so if you're really stuck with the course, then it might be easiest just to treat this as a self-study, and cease to expect any sort of learning facilitation from the professor whatsoever. It's up to your own conscience whether you pursue some sort of censure or reprisal for the teacher, but in terms of your personal well-being and academic progress, then letting go of your expectations for your professor will help you stop feeling mad and focus on dealing with the situation at hand.
The ugly truth about post-secondary education is that you don't really need the professors to learn the material. They're there to provide some structure and answer questions, but anything you need to know to pass intro chemistry you can get on your own. Do absolutely follow up with the teacher (politely, but doggedly) to correct any suspected errors in assessment, make sure your grades are what you've expected, petition for credit on test questions where calculations are in error, etc. If she drops the ball on these things, then seek assistance from the department head if necessary. But apart from that, put your energy into finding alternative ways to teach yourself the material.
You're actually in a pretty good position to go this alone, since the final exam is pre-set by someone other than your prof. So you could try approaching another, less flaky professor in the department who's taught this course in the past, asking for reading and test-prep suggestions. You could ask the department secretary if there are old copies of the exam that you could study from. You could ask your own prof what other textbook her test-question bank references, saying that you'd like to practice working through some of those problems, as well. You could swing by the learning center and sign up for private tutoring. Or you could work through some of the hundreds of intro-chemistry tutorials and self-help quizzes on the web to privately school yourself in the material.
If you've done well so far, then I'm guessing some subset of these approaches will allow you to emerge from the course relatively unscathed. It does suck that you're paying to be taught chemistry by someone who's actually obstructing your learning, but if you're going all the way to the doctorate then a little experience with autodidacticism may actually be the best thing for you, in the long run. Sorry you're having to deal with this!
posted by Bardolph at 5:27 PM on October 26, 2010
With that said, it sounds as though you've got the capacity to master the material by yourself, so if you're really stuck with the course, then it might be easiest just to treat this as a self-study, and cease to expect any sort of learning facilitation from the professor whatsoever. It's up to your own conscience whether you pursue some sort of censure or reprisal for the teacher, but in terms of your personal well-being and academic progress, then letting go of your expectations for your professor will help you stop feeling mad and focus on dealing with the situation at hand.
The ugly truth about post-secondary education is that you don't really need the professors to learn the material. They're there to provide some structure and answer questions, but anything you need to know to pass intro chemistry you can get on your own. Do absolutely follow up with the teacher (politely, but doggedly) to correct any suspected errors in assessment, make sure your grades are what you've expected, petition for credit on test questions where calculations are in error, etc. If she drops the ball on these things, then seek assistance from the department head if necessary. But apart from that, put your energy into finding alternative ways to teach yourself the material.
You're actually in a pretty good position to go this alone, since the final exam is pre-set by someone other than your prof. So you could try approaching another, less flaky professor in the department who's taught this course in the past, asking for reading and test-prep suggestions. You could ask the department secretary if there are old copies of the exam that you could study from. You could ask your own prof what other textbook her test-question bank references, saying that you'd like to practice working through some of those problems, as well. You could swing by the learning center and sign up for private tutoring. Or you could work through some of the hundreds of intro-chemistry tutorials and self-help quizzes on the web to privately school yourself in the material.
If you've done well so far, then I'm guessing some subset of these approaches will allow you to emerge from the course relatively unscathed. It does suck that you're paying to be taught chemistry by someone who's actually obstructing your learning, but if you're going all the way to the doctorate then a little experience with autodidacticism may actually be the best thing for you, in the long run. Sorry you're having to deal with this!
posted by Bardolph at 5:27 PM on October 26, 2010
I know you said you don't want to report her to the Dean, but I think you should. She's doing the student a disservice in her ways of "teaching." It sounds like this has been an ongoing problem. You surely are not the only one being negatively impacted by this. You sound like you have a pretty reasonable head on your shoulders about the whole situation. However, you need documentation of these problems. Especially if it going to come back and harm your grade later.
posted by quodlibet at 5:34 PM on October 26, 2010
posted by quodlibet at 5:34 PM on October 26, 2010
Usually I'm all keep-your-head-down-and-bite-the-bullet-unless-you're-not-going-to-pass when people complain about bad professors on here, but this sounds absurdly bad. If you can't drop this class without repercussion, please go to the head of her department and ask if you can make a complaint.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 5:58 PM on October 26, 2010
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 5:58 PM on October 26, 2010
Document and go to the department chair. You feel sympathy because she's in a bad place, but your class, her other sections, and future term students DO NOT NEED this crap. The dept chair needs to KNOW that she's a crappy teacher who can't even get the examples right in class, who has lost grades on work she's graded and returned, who isn't being open about what she's recorded.
It doesn't matter how sympathetic you feel, she's not doing her job.
posted by galadriel at 6:04 PM on October 26, 2010
It doesn't matter how sympathetic you feel, she's not doing her job.
posted by galadriel at 6:04 PM on October 26, 2010
I am an instructor for introductory level classes, and if your instructor were one of my colleagues, I would be praying that one of their students would report them. People who denigrate their students when they themselves can't solve a problem, who don't have enough respect for their students to teach them well, are almost universally also awful to their peers.
Collect up your documentation, think about your arguments ("I'm scared the final will be hard" is not a good tack, no matter the validity; do not complain at all about the difficulty of the course. Even complaining about test questions that appear to come from "nowhere" is problematic unless they are clearly off the wall.) and go to whomever her direct supervisor is (presumably someone in the chemistry department) and be calm and respectful. You have a very good case to present, based on what you have here, and you owe it to yourself and your classmates (who may not know better) to not take this.
posted by TypographicalError at 6:58 PM on October 26, 2010
Collect up your documentation, think about your arguments ("I'm scared the final will be hard" is not a good tack, no matter the validity; do not complain at all about the difficulty of the course. Even complaining about test questions that appear to come from "nowhere" is problematic unless they are clearly off the wall.) and go to whomever her direct supervisor is (presumably someone in the chemistry department) and be calm and respectful. You have a very good case to present, based on what you have here, and you owe it to yourself and your classmates (who may not know better) to not take this.
posted by TypographicalError at 6:58 PM on October 26, 2010
You are a beginning student of a PhD program. Any PhD program is a long haul, where the student has to learn new things, pick up new skills—all by themselves without any external help in most cases. Is she doing great disservice to students? Yes, sure. But it is a good idea to ask yourself—especially right now when you are in early stages of PhD program—that if you are getting upset at the incompetence of one teacher, is the PhD is really worth your hard and long slog?
posted by coolnik at 8:53 PM on October 26, 2010
posted by coolnik at 8:53 PM on October 26, 2010
The easiest course of action here would be to petition the department to change sections, if at all possible, or drop the course for the semester & start over with someone who demonstrates that they know what they are talking about when standing at the lecturn.
But you should remember that you are paying for a service, namely to be taught the *correct* information everytime you are in class. If you are not receiving the service you are paying for, it is within your right to make a reasonable complaint to the department. Regardless of the instructor's life circumstances. I seriously doubt that *your* life circumstances would be taken into consideration if the tables were turned.
posted by vignettist at 11:30 PM on October 26, 2010
But you should remember that you are paying for a service, namely to be taught the *correct* information everytime you are in class. If you are not receiving the service you are paying for, it is within your right to make a reasonable complaint to the department. Regardless of the instructor's life circumstances. I seriously doubt that *your* life circumstances would be taken into consideration if the tables were turned.
posted by vignettist at 11:30 PM on October 26, 2010
One bad mark is not going to kill you.
And even then, it sounds like you aren't going to get that bad a mark. Maybe a B, a C at worst? So what. You'll ace Chem next semester and no one will speak of it again.
Everyone gets shitty profs. Do your best, and don't let it keep you up at night. And feel free to give her a shitty review - the Dean's not going to fire her, and it's good to let the department know how the profs are performing in the classroom.
(I notice mature students have a much harder time dealing with unprepared/disorganized profs and TAs, presumably because they're used to the standards of the working world. These standards do not apply on campus. Remember, half your fellow students are getting high every night and don't give two shits about their grades, and they're still going to graduate. You're way ahead of them.)
posted by auto-correct at 12:00 AM on October 27, 2010
And even then, it sounds like you aren't going to get that bad a mark. Maybe a B, a C at worst? So what. You'll ace Chem next semester and no one will speak of it again.
Everyone gets shitty profs. Do your best, and don't let it keep you up at night. And feel free to give her a shitty review - the Dean's not going to fire her, and it's good to let the department know how the profs are performing in the classroom.
(I notice mature students have a much harder time dealing with unprepared/disorganized profs and TAs, presumably because they're used to the standards of the working world. These standards do not apply on campus. Remember, half your fellow students are getting high every night and don't give two shits about their grades, and they're still going to graduate. You're way ahead of them.)
posted by auto-correct at 12:00 AM on October 27, 2010
I think coolnik is correct from one standpoint, but vignettist is more correct. Maybe we wouldn't all be such morons if we held our educators to higher standards.
The message of education shouldn't be "drop the class or ignore it because it probably won't affect your ability to graduate". Education is supposed to be about more than passing the test. That's what all the teachers here keep telling us, isn't it? Why doesn't that apply to college professors?
(I notice mature students have a much harder time dealing with unprepared/disorganized profs and TAs, presumably because they're used to the standards of the working world. These standards do not apply on campus. Remember, half your fellow students are getting high every night and don't give two shits about their grades, and they're still going to graduate. You're way ahead of them.)
That's the truth. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. The trouble starts when you realize these professors were probably part of the half who got high constantly.
posted by gjc at 5:48 AM on October 27, 2010
The message of education shouldn't be "drop the class or ignore it because it probably won't affect your ability to graduate". Education is supposed to be about more than passing the test. That's what all the teachers here keep telling us, isn't it? Why doesn't that apply to college professors?
(I notice mature students have a much harder time dealing with unprepared/disorganized profs and TAs, presumably because they're used to the standards of the working world. These standards do not apply on campus. Remember, half your fellow students are getting high every night and don't give two shits about their grades, and they're still going to graduate. You're way ahead of them.)
That's the truth. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. The trouble starts when you realize these professors were probably part of the half who got high constantly.
posted by gjc at 5:48 AM on October 27, 2010
I would absolutely complain, I don't care what life circumstances she has (we all have them). But I would only complain after grades are posted and this professor no longer has the ability to negatively impact you. If you don't get a course evaluation sheet in class, you can usually request one from the department. Go ahead and post a rating on RateMyProfessor, too, with as many objective points as you can manage (not "difficult", but "loses grades" or "often makes mistakes during class"). Your fellow students will thank you, and maybe it will be a wake up call for this professor.
For keeping your chin up now... Remind yourself of how well you did on the first test (which she also predicted you would do horribly on, so it's not like her predictions are accurate). Remind yourself that it's just a short time period until the course is over, and she's gone from your life forever. Try to enjoy learning for the sake of learning (chem can be fun). And find some study buddies who you can be around while you're studying, I know it's harder if you're non-traditional and especially at community college, but just being out of the house while studying is nice.
posted by anaelith at 5:55 AM on October 27, 2010
For keeping your chin up now... Remind yourself of how well you did on the first test (which she also predicted you would do horribly on, so it's not like her predictions are accurate). Remind yourself that it's just a short time period until the course is over, and she's gone from your life forever. Try to enjoy learning for the sake of learning (chem can be fun). And find some study buddies who you can be around while you're studying, I know it's harder if you're non-traditional and especially at community college, but just being out of the house while studying is nice.
posted by anaelith at 5:55 AM on October 27, 2010
Your other answers are very reasonable and worth paying attention to.
I have an answer for you that's unreasonable, and that you may well be wise to disregard, but that I have a lot of confidence in nonetheless.
Your teacher saw you coming a mile away and is terrified you will expose her incompetence. An incompetence of which she is well aware, which she has been concealing successfully for years, and which she will go to almost any length to continue to conceal.
In the beginning, she was extremely discouraging because I hadn't taken a "Chemistry for Non-Majors" course that the department highly recommends. She kept saying to everyone that anyone who hadn't taken it would probably fail the course or get a C at best. On our first exam, I studied hard and got a perfect paper. So now my stock is up.
This was a direct attempt to get you out of the course, but it failed, and now she has embarked on plan B, which is to arrange matters so that she can justify giving you a bad grade in order to make any complaint you may choose to make look like sour grapes.
I took an exam yesterday, and while she put down a few "charity questions" from the quizzes, there were a lot of problems I didn't know exactly how to solve. They looked like they were copied from a different textbook and we had no experience solving them. She justified this by saying that the final exam would have hard questions that required a higher level of analysis than we were used to. I had studied my hw questions, practice problems in the extremely expensive, customized version of the textbook, and previous quizzes, assuming that the questions would be similar. They weren't. They were a hodgepodge of questions that were very different from quizzes and the homework, and the right answers were often off by a few tenths, even though all the data was given (molar masses, equations, etc) and we used calculators. When I asked her about this, she said, "I got the questions from a test pool and noticed that a lot of them had bad calculations." Um, okay.
She included a bunch of questions she was sure you (yes, you in particular) couldn't get, and just for insurance then changed the "right" answers so that she could still mark you wrong if you somehow did get them.
I take school seriously. I'm a working adult. This isn't a joke for me, it's very important and I spend a lot of time on it. She won't let me see her gradebook to make sure she's recorded all my grades correctly so far. Midterm grades were due yesterday and when I asked her about them, she was dismissive and said it didn't really matter, and she wanted to factor in a bunch of other things like attendance and homework, etc. So she's not letting me see where I am, according to her, and I'm pretty certain she's probably misrecorded a bunch of things.
She gave you a bad midterm grade, and is trying to prevent you from finding out about it until it's too late for you to protest.
Recently, she handed a lab report back where she took off half the points because she claimed that I had not done the calculations. I flipped open the report and pointed out to here that they were right there and she'd corrected them. She also said I was missing two labs and I opened up my folder and said, "No, look, you already marked them."
Come on, you have to admit that you know in your heart of hearts what she's doing here. Hold on to these misgraded lab reports. They constitute strong evidence in your favor if you end up having to make a case against her.
My advice is to drop out now and never look back, if you have that option.
Failing that, go to the dean now with a complete account of your complaints with all the documentation you can muster. It's your only other chance.
But really, just drop out and cut your losses if you can.
posted by jamjam at 11:43 AM on October 27, 2010
I have an answer for you that's unreasonable, and that you may well be wise to disregard, but that I have a lot of confidence in nonetheless.
Your teacher saw you coming a mile away and is terrified you will expose her incompetence. An incompetence of which she is well aware, which she has been concealing successfully for years, and which she will go to almost any length to continue to conceal.
In the beginning, she was extremely discouraging because I hadn't taken a "Chemistry for Non-Majors" course that the department highly recommends. She kept saying to everyone that anyone who hadn't taken it would probably fail the course or get a C at best. On our first exam, I studied hard and got a perfect paper. So now my stock is up.
This was a direct attempt to get you out of the course, but it failed, and now she has embarked on plan B, which is to arrange matters so that she can justify giving you a bad grade in order to make any complaint you may choose to make look like sour grapes.
I took an exam yesterday, and while she put down a few "charity questions" from the quizzes, there were a lot of problems I didn't know exactly how to solve. They looked like they were copied from a different textbook and we had no experience solving them. She justified this by saying that the final exam would have hard questions that required a higher level of analysis than we were used to. I had studied my hw questions, practice problems in the extremely expensive, customized version of the textbook, and previous quizzes, assuming that the questions would be similar. They weren't. They were a hodgepodge of questions that were very different from quizzes and the homework, and the right answers were often off by a few tenths, even though all the data was given (molar masses, equations, etc) and we used calculators. When I asked her about this, she said, "I got the questions from a test pool and noticed that a lot of them had bad calculations." Um, okay.
She included a bunch of questions she was sure you (yes, you in particular) couldn't get, and just for insurance then changed the "right" answers so that she could still mark you wrong if you somehow did get them.
I take school seriously. I'm a working adult. This isn't a joke for me, it's very important and I spend a lot of time on it. She won't let me see her gradebook to make sure she's recorded all my grades correctly so far. Midterm grades were due yesterday and when I asked her about them, she was dismissive and said it didn't really matter, and she wanted to factor in a bunch of other things like attendance and homework, etc. So she's not letting me see where I am, according to her, and I'm pretty certain she's probably misrecorded a bunch of things.
She gave you a bad midterm grade, and is trying to prevent you from finding out about it until it's too late for you to protest.
Recently, she handed a lab report back where she took off half the points because she claimed that I had not done the calculations. I flipped open the report and pointed out to here that they were right there and she'd corrected them. She also said I was missing two labs and I opened up my folder and said, "No, look, you already marked them."
Come on, you have to admit that you know in your heart of hearts what she's doing here. Hold on to these misgraded lab reports. They constitute strong evidence in your favor if you end up having to make a case against her.
My advice is to drop out now and never look back, if you have that option.
Failing that, go to the dean now with a complete account of your complaints with all the documentation you can muster. It's your only other chance.
But really, just drop out and cut your losses if you can.
posted by jamjam at 11:43 AM on October 27, 2010
I am all for not complaining about little titchy nonsense, but this is ridiculous. If a professor of mine were dealing with personal stuff, I would recognize that late or missed classes, quizzes and homework being graded slowly, and some flakiness are understandable. But this teacher apparently can't teach chemistry. It may simply be that you are one of the few people in the class to recognize the scope of the disaster. Let a department head or dean know. Not that some of the test questions were hard, but that she doesn't have an answer key, that she isn't keeping track of grades, that she is grading questions incorrectly. She is not preparing any of you for future classes.
posted by freshwater at 10:45 AM on October 28, 2010
posted by freshwater at 10:45 AM on October 28, 2010
Jamjam wrote
She included a bunch of questions she was sure you (yes, you in particular) couldn't get, and just for insurance then changed the "right" answers so that she could still mark you wrong if you somehow did get them.
this answer is paranoid at best, delusional at worst.
Lots of other good advice though.
posted by lalochezia at 11:00 PM on November 1, 2010
She included a bunch of questions she was sure you (yes, you in particular) couldn't get, and just for insurance then changed the "right" answers so that she could still mark you wrong if you somehow did get them.
this answer is paranoid at best, delusional at worst.
Lots of other good advice though.
posted by lalochezia at 11:00 PM on November 1, 2010
Feeling a bit nervous and defensive about those student evaluations, eh?
No doubt you have your reasons.
posted by jamjam at 12:04 AM on November 2, 2010
No doubt you have your reasons.
posted by jamjam at 12:04 AM on November 2, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by amtho at 5:06 PM on October 26, 2010