Re: Caving in

["Richard W. Tarara" <rtarara@saintmarys.edu>]

> From: Keith C. Tipton <kctipton@TENET.EDU>
>
> What do kids say or do to get you to change your mind about grading, test
> schedules, incompletes, curves, etc?  What do you say or do about it? 
> What has worked best, in your opinion?  Has your dept chair backed you? 
> Have you found that it seems that 'most' other teachers give in, making
> you look particularly out-of-place in the scheme of things at your
school? 
> Many thanks,
>
> Keith

A couple points:  Have your class rules IN WRITING and distributed at the
beginning of the year.  While students WILL try any and all excuses to get
you to change these rules, in most cases, if you stick to your guns, they
will just shrug and say (sometimes even to you), 'Well it was worth a try.'
 There WILL also be a few cases where you should bend, but make those few
and far between--and try not to advertise these if done on an individual
basis.

In general, don't curve grades.  Set an absolute grade scale for grades
(but reserve the right to lower the cut-offs for final grades.)  Adjust the
course grading through how 'mean or nice' you are with partial credit, with
the difficulty of questions/problems, and/or by offering 'bonus' questions
(the ability to score more than 100%) on given quizzes or tests.  If your
final ends up too hard, then curve that--either use a SHOVE {raise the
highest score to 100 and everyone else accordingly) or (if you get a huge
range of scores) you can alway use the square-root curve--10 time the
square root of the original score!  This raises all scores and tightens up
the spread.

We're pretty autonomous here with a few exceptions.  Only the academic
affairs office can change the time of an exam (but will do so for an
individual that has three exams on the same day).  Only that office can
issue an excused absence (although athletics get automatic ones) but that
gives the faculty a good out on most student requests--'Go to academic
affairs--if its Ok with them then you're excused'.

Problems here come mostly around break times when (at least according to
students--and never trust this) 'All their other teachers have cancelled
class!'  This is, of course, against school policy (which doesn't keep some
faculty from actually doing it) but for the most part is a con-job by
students.

Rick Tarara

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Richard W. Tarara                  
Department of Chemistry & Physics      
Saint Mary's College                    
Notre Dame, IN 46556 
219-284-4664 
rtarara@saintmarys.edu  
                  
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