TEACHERS: Share your most outrageous parent stories

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:From the college ranks: My husband is a professor and he had a student email him the day before the scheduled final to say he needed to make up the final AFTER winter break because he was going on a "once in a lifetime ski trip" with his family. DH told him a ski trip was not one of the valid excuses for missing the final and that he knew when the final was scheduled when he signed up for the class. So student no shows the final then at the start of the spring semester sends an email saying he needed to make up the final because he was hospitalized with mono during the scheduled time. DH said, no problem, just bring in the discharge papers/bill/Doctor's note verifying that and I'll let you sit a makeup exam. No response from the student. Student's mom shows up at the Dean's office (and no, she wasn't local, she drove/flew several hours) livid about this and claims DH is discriminating against her asthmatic son by not allowing him to make up the final for health reasons. My DH gets called over to the Dean's office to deal with irate mom. He produced the email showing he'd happily allow the student to make up the test if he could document that he missed due to illness. Mother gets all huffy and leaves. She then returns that afternoon with a "doctor's note" scrawled on some plain printer paper saying that her son was hospitalized with an asthma attack. Except the date is wrong. And the student had claimed to be sick with mono. And then the student worker in the Dean's office who overheard Mom's ranting and recognized the student as a classmate walks in and asks if she can show the Dean something. That something was a bunch of pictures of student on the slopes with his mom and dad and brother posted on the evening of the final with captions like "awesome skiing today!" Mom then screamed that she was going to sue all of them and left.

New poster. I certainly don't condone the lying or general jerk behavior you describe from this student/family. But in reading this story, it does seem a little inflexible to force all students to take the exam on a single day and not allow exceptions aside from illness with doctor note. I understand it is not practical to allow students to just take the exam on any old day, because that would be chaos. But there clearly is a process in place for at least one make up exam day. Yes, I understand that in the real world there are deadlines that people must meet, but in the real world, people are usually pretty flexible about scheduling those deadlines to account for different situations, at least where flexibility is available.

I know it's general policy for college profs to set a single exam day, or at least it was when I was in college. But it does seem like a practice that could stand some revision.

Oh well. That's my view. Now I'll probably get flamed by people saying "darn kids these days need to learn the value of hard work and deadlines!".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:From the college ranks: My husband is a professor and he had a student email him the day before the scheduled final to say he needed to make up the final AFTER winter break because he was going on a "once in a lifetime ski trip" with his family. DH told him a ski trip was not one of the valid excuses for missing the final and that he knew when the final was scheduled when he signed up for the class. So student no shows the final then at the start of the spring semester sends an email saying he needed to make up the final because he was hospitalized with mono during the scheduled time. DH said, no problem, just bring in the discharge papers/bill/Doctor's note verifying that and I'll let you sit a makeup exam. No response from the student. Student's mom shows up at the Dean's office (and no, she wasn't local, she drove/flew several hours) livid about this and claims DH is discriminating against her asthmatic son by not allowing him to make up the final for health reasons. My DH gets called over to the Dean's office to deal with irate mom. He produced the email showing he'd happily allow the student to make up the test if he could document that he missed due to illness. Mother gets all huffy and leaves. She then returns that afternoon with a "doctor's note" scrawled on some plain printer paper saying that her son was hospitalized with an asthma attack. Except the date is wrong. And the student had claimed to be sick with mono. And then the student worker in the Dean's office who overheard Mom's ranting and recognized the student as a classmate walks in and asks if she can show the Dean something. That something was a bunch of pictures of student on the slopes with his mom and dad and brother posted on the evening of the final with captions like "awesome skiing today!" Mom then screamed that she was going to sue all of them and left.

New poster. I certainly don't condone the lying or general jerk behavior you describe from this student/family. But in reading this story, it does seem a little inflexible to force all students to take the exam on a single day and not allow exceptions aside from illness with doctor note. I understand it is not practical to allow students to just take the exam on any old day, because that would be chaos. But there clearly is a process in place for at least one make up exam day. Yes, I understand that in the real world there are deadlines that people must meet, but in the real world, people are usually pretty flexible about scheduling those deadlines to account for different situations, at least where flexibility is available.

I know it's general policy for college profs to set a single exam day, or at least it was when I was in college. But it does seem like a practice that could stand some revision.

Oh well. That's my view. Now I'll probably get flamed by people saying "darn kids these days need to learn the value of hard work and deadlines!".

No flames here, just an explanation of why I don't think there should be non-illness/family death (a verified emergency) makeups.

1) students know about the exam day on the first day of class - if you have a prescheduled trip or don't want an exam on the final day of finals period you can drop the class and pick up a different one without penalty at this point
2) makeup policies are also usually clearly spelled out in the syllabus, at some colleges the policy is set by the department or the college itself
3) a makeup isn't just a matter of a prof showing up on a different day to sit in the room while the student tests; technically if you're trying to maintain the fairness of the exam you would need to write a new exam for the makeup test, so if the professor wrote a 3 hour exam for the final period that is asking the professor to now spend a considerable amount of time writing another new test for one student to facilitate some leisure time for the student which really isn't fair to the prof or the other students
4) delaying the final gives the student an advantage in study time over classmates; personally it doesn't seem very fair that everyone else has multiple exams to study for in a small time window and one student would get the entire holiday break to study for just the one exam because they wanted to go skiiing

Maybe you are thinking of other reasons for makeup tests, but professors are usually pretty accommodating to those types of things (athletic conflicts, presenting a paper somewhere, etc.) because students give them notice as soon as they know of the conflict. I agree with you that some deadlines are flexible in real life too, but I don't know of any profession in which it would be ok the day before the deadline to email your boss and say "sorry I won't make the deadline tomorrow, there's awesome snow in X so I'm going skiing. But don't worry, I'll get to it when I get back" or "sorry I won't make the deadline tomorrow, my family decided they wanted to go to Disney World so we're going to Orlando tomorrow. I'll get to the stuff when I get back."

If the trip had been planned prior to semester start then as soon as the student saw the exam date he should have gone to the prof and said he really wanted to take the class but he had a conflict with the exam. At that point the prof might have been willing to give a makeup test *before* the rest of the class tested or would have said there was a strict no makeup policy except for illness/emergency. Then the student could have decided what to do. I mean really if you think the prof should have given a makeup to this student, should the prof have to give makeups if a student isn't a morning person and would prefer to test in the afternoon? wants to leave for break early and doesn't want to show up on the last day of exam period? has two tests on the same day? It doesn't make sense. There isn't typically a "makeup day" set. Also, just want to say that it can also be a bit of an administrative nightmare for both the prof and the student (at some, not all colleges) to bump the exam into the next term for a makeup. It means the student has to take an incomplete on the class because the grade won't be available within time frames, then the prof has to submit the grade and paperwork to get the incomplete removed, at least this was the case at one of the colleges I was employed at in another state. Makeups create a LOT of extra work for a good professor, so there really should be a legit reason for them.

[Anonymous]

So, PP, what happened? Did the kid fail? (He should have, in my opinion.)

I am fascinated by the psychology of parents who believe their kids can do no wrong, and automatically take their sides without any sort of critical thinking. My parents were both public school teachers, and if I was disciplined in school their default was to believe the teacher. If it turned out that I was being unfairly targeted, they'd have come to my defense - hard - but their initial reaction was most certainly not, "Oh, not MY daughter - she couldn't possibly do THAT." Any parent who says that is just an idiot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

New poster. I certainly don't condone the lying or general jerk behavior you describe from this student/family. But in reading this story, it does seem a little inflexible to force all students to take the exam on a single day and not allow exceptions aside from illness with doctor note. I understand it is not practical to allow students to just take the exam on any old day, because that would be chaos. But there clearly is a process in place for at least one make up exam day. Yes, I understand that in the real world there are deadlines that people must meet, but in the real world, people are usually pretty flexible about scheduling those deadlines to account for different situations, at least where flexibility is available.

I know it's general policy for college profs to set a single exam day, or at least it was when I was in college. But it does seem like a practice that could stand some revision.

Oh well. That's my view. Now I'll probably get flamed by people saying "darn kids these days need to learn the value of hard work and deadlines!".

I think one problem is that the prof has to write a whole second test, to deter cheating. Is the kid's family ski vacation more valuable than this use of the prof's time?

Also, if word gets out that the prof will allow a retake for a non-health or non-emergency reason, then you will have half the class claiming a family vacation (and nothing like a doctor's note to verify) just so they can take the test a week or two later and use the extra time to study.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So, PP, what happened? Did the kid fail? (He should have, in my opinion.)

I am fascinated by the psychology of parents who believe their kids can do no wrong, and automatically take their sides without any sort of critical thinking. My parents were both public school teachers, and if I was disciplined in school their default was to believe the teacher. If it turned out that I was being unfairly targeted, they'd have come to my defense - hard - but their initial reaction was most certainly not, "Oh, not MY daughter - she couldn't possibly do THAT." Any parent who says that is just an idiot.

I'm pretty sure he failed unless someone way above DH's pay grade modified things well after the semester was over based on all of the letters the mother wrote. I think the final was something like 30% of the grade and the student had not been on track for an A at all, so I think the 0 would have definitely resulted in a failing grade. I think the last involvement my DH had was helping the Dean compile all the correspondence and such in hard copy to send over to the legal folks for the University, but I think that was due to the mother writing letters to someone up the ladder, not due to an actual lawsuit.