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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Better to learn to follow directions now.

I teach college and last year I had a student hand in an essay that completely missed the purpose of the assignments. She was a great student, had been doing very well in the course, was a lovely person but for whatever reason she just went completely off base on her final term paper. She wrote a great paper and obviously put a lot of work into it but it wasn't the paper that was assigned.

I graded using a rubric and there were parts of the rubric that I couldn't even apply to her paper. I gave her marks where I could and her final mark was around 40%.

She contacted me immediately asking to meet. She came to my office and she looked like she had been through something awful. She told me she couldn't sleep or eat, that she had never failed anything and she didn't know how to cope with this. She started sobbing in my office and it was a bit heart wrenching. I could see that she really didn't know how to cope with this. She pleaded and pleaded to let her rewrite it or to grade it differently or do a bonus assignment or anything because she couldn't accept a failing grade. I said no to all and she was honestly almost traumatized. I really think this was the most difficult thing that she had gone through (as a high achiever). I had to get her support from a friend to leave my office. [b]Her mom called me a couple days later [/b]pleading with me to do something as her daughter was not coping well and this had impacted her mental health.

I met twice more with the student helping her to learn to cope and build resilience and never changed her mark. That would have been the easy out for me and made her happy but this was a life lesson she needed to learn and it was what was fair. She never fully understood. She did pull herself back together and did fine in my class (above the class average but lower than her usual marks). It would have been much much better for her to learn this when she was younger. [/quote]

Wait.  Her MOM called you?  Is this a thing now? [b] I am floored that parents now think it is OK to call their child's university professors to plead for special favors (or for any reason). [/b] I would have been absolutely mortified if my parents had done this.  [/quote]

NP. This is off topic to this thread but since you ask, the answer is that parents feel emboldened to do this because colleges have turned parents into consumers with power. They charge such ridiculous prices for tuition and fees now. My alma mater costs 75k a year including room and board. It was under 35k when I attended 20 years ago. There is no way on earth it is truly "worth" 75k except that there are some people (about 1200 families per year) who can afford it.

When my kids are old enough to attend, it'll probably be close to 100k. You better believe I will be PISSED if I hand over 400k to a school to educate my kid and a professor pulls a stunt like the one above.

Don't charge astronomical prices and you'll get more reasonable responses. The more you charge, the more you empower people as consumers who can EASILY go elsewhere and take their money with them.[/quote]

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