- Mar 25, 2007
- 1,310
- 10
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Why should I allow them to take 4 tests, and then drop one? No boss on the planet is going to allow that. "Here. We have these 4 very important clients with very important projects. Go ahead and screw one over. We'll lose the client and all the income they could have produced, but that's okay. I know your life is busy."
School is their job. While they may have a family and a job and umpteen other things to do, they have chosen to come to school to work towards a degree. If they are not willing to do the work, then perhaps they need to wait until they can handle the workload. Otherwise they need to be more organized and plan better.
No, we never let them drop an exam--if they took it, it got included in their grade, but they had to decide whether or not to take it. The basic problem this solves is that when you have a lecture of 500 students (which I did), and the department has resources for exactly two TAs, there is just no way on earth to manage the logistics of make-up exams. Worse, in my experience, a LOT of people asking for make-up exams cheat--they've already got the answers or the gist of the questions from someone else, they know you're not going to write 50 different exams. Certainly there are many legit excuses, but there are also a LOT of cheaters and with one professor, two TAs and 50-100 students who will demand a make-up exam if they think they have half a chance, you're going to get more cheaters and more dead grandmothers than you can handle. Also, extra credit assignments from 500 students is just not feasible to manage, so we told them they could not have extra credit if they were doing poorly, but they COULD take the final if they felt they needed it to boost their grade. You know as well as I do that it doesn't matter how they were told, they'll ask/demand anyway, just in case.
Sadly, I know an awful lot of bosses who not only DO allow that, but do much worse than that themselves. Hate to break it to you, but if colleges are really attempting to prepare students for the working world, there should probably be a major in brown-nosing, golfing, spewing incomprehensible horsepuckey and sleeping your way to the top...competence, knowledge of the subject matter, intelligence, not so much.
It's not a matter of being unwilling to do the work, it's just that when you're doing that much, things get tightly scheduled to the minute for a couple of days. I know this is difficult for academics to understand, but the rest of the world does not have the same flexible schedule in their daily life that the Ivory Tower enjoys--and the vast majority of people will never enjoy that flexibility in any job, unless they have an awful lot of education. You see the circular logic here? No education -> no workplace flexibility -> no education. I never had any workplace flexibility in what hours I was working and when I could take time off until I had a Master's, and even then my boss gave me heck about it. Now, I can come in whenever and do whatever, as long as the work gets done--and of course any school I do at this point is purely for the love of learning! Would you really tell an EMT who was working on that car wreck, "Sorry, you're going to have to tell your shift manager to stop cleaning up bodies and hauling them to the hospital because you have to take the final within 24 hours"? What about the hospital nurse caring for the crash victims, or the police officer helping to clear traffic? They take classes too--should they quit because their jobs are not flexible when it comes to emergencies? Do you not want them to take continuing education to keep up on their skills? Many of those jobs don't pay enough that they will ever be able to quit entirely for several years to dedicate themselves to school.
I do realize that schools have plenty of students and aren't exactly hurting for warm bodies to fill the seats, so there is absolutely no motivation for you to accommodate students. I just think it's not good for society and serves only the fairly privileged when you're that strict--you'd be very upset if the people whose jobs you rely on (first responders, teachers, nurses, doctors--yes, even MDs) were incompetent or using outdated techniques because they couldn't get the education to do better.
School is their job. While they may have a family and a job and umpteen other things to do, they have chosen to come to school to work towards a degree. If they are not willing to do the work, then perhaps they need to wait until they can handle the workload. Otherwise they need to be more organized and plan better.
No, we never let them drop an exam--if they took it, it got included in their grade, but they had to decide whether or not to take it. The basic problem this solves is that when you have a lecture of 500 students (which I did), and the department has resources for exactly two TAs, there is just no way on earth to manage the logistics of make-up exams. Worse, in my experience, a LOT of people asking for make-up exams cheat--they've already got the answers or the gist of the questions from someone else, they know you're not going to write 50 different exams. Certainly there are many legit excuses, but there are also a LOT of cheaters and with one professor, two TAs and 50-100 students who will demand a make-up exam if they think they have half a chance, you're going to get more cheaters and more dead grandmothers than you can handle. Also, extra credit assignments from 500 students is just not feasible to manage, so we told them they could not have extra credit if they were doing poorly, but they COULD take the final if they felt they needed it to boost their grade. You know as well as I do that it doesn't matter how they were told, they'll ask/demand anyway, just in case.
Sadly, I know an awful lot of bosses who not only DO allow that, but do much worse than that themselves. Hate to break it to you, but if colleges are really attempting to prepare students for the working world, there should probably be a major in brown-nosing, golfing, spewing incomprehensible horsepuckey and sleeping your way to the top...competence, knowledge of the subject matter, intelligence, not so much.
It's not a matter of being unwilling to do the work, it's just that when you're doing that much, things get tightly scheduled to the minute for a couple of days. I know this is difficult for academics to understand, but the rest of the world does not have the same flexible schedule in their daily life that the Ivory Tower enjoys--and the vast majority of people will never enjoy that flexibility in any job, unless they have an awful lot of education. You see the circular logic here? No education -> no workplace flexibility -> no education. I never had any workplace flexibility in what hours I was working and when I could take time off until I had a Master's, and even then my boss gave me heck about it. Now, I can come in whenever and do whatever, as long as the work gets done--and of course any school I do at this point is purely for the love of learning! Would you really tell an EMT who was working on that car wreck, "Sorry, you're going to have to tell your shift manager to stop cleaning up bodies and hauling them to the hospital because you have to take the final within 24 hours"? What about the hospital nurse caring for the crash victims, or the police officer helping to clear traffic? They take classes too--should they quit because their jobs are not flexible when it comes to emergencies? Do you not want them to take continuing education to keep up on their skills? Many of those jobs don't pay enough that they will ever be able to quit entirely for several years to dedicate themselves to school.
I do realize that schools have plenty of students and aren't exactly hurting for warm bodies to fill the seats, so there is absolutely no motivation for you to accommodate students. I just think it's not good for society and serves only the fairly privileged when you're that strict--you'd be very upset if the people whose jobs you rely on (first responders, teachers, nurses, doctors--yes, even MDs) were incompetent or using outdated techniques because they couldn't get the education to do better.
