Yes, you're right. I don't like you. You are too pretty. That's exactly why I keep telling you to shut up. Because you're too pretty. I'm jealous of your youth and vigor and ability to stay up all night while not doing any studying for my class. I am a mean bully who uses grades to get students to like me and to punish those that aren't my exact clone. I dislike your "high-spiritedness" because what you call high-spirited, I call gossiping in my class and not paying attention to lecture or to the task at hand. And yes, I mark your tests and papers lower because I hate you and not because your answers are wrong.
- Ah, the grade whore....I could swear that I have 5 or 6 of you in my class each semester. Let me fill you in on something, sweetheart. I have enough self-esteem that I don't need to demonstrate my intellectual superiority through a self-righteous power trip. If you think it makes me giddy to slip a "B-" into the box instead of an earned "B" just because I thought someone was too pretty or too smart, then you have self-esteem issues of your own: delusions of grandeur.
- Get over yourself. If your professors tell you any grade is possible, they mean that it's up to you to EARN your grade. And it is. You earn your grade; I grade according to what work you've put in. Your personality (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with the number at the top of the page. It does, however, affect my willingness to write letters of recommendation for you. But since you're too pretty, you won't need any of those. Oh, and if you were "a little too smart," you wouldn't need to take my class.
- Are you kidding me? I never wait until final papers are due--I assign final grades about a week into the semester and then adjust the marks for each paper to fit that grade--you little twerp.
- Your question makes you sound like you are some kind of super keener know-it-all who is not only a grade grubber, but also an attention whore. Maybe you are so busy being "too pretty" and "too smart" to realize that you are not getting the grade you think you deserve because you really didn't deserve it. Oh, and to answer your question, no, I never give grades as punishment. I don't "give" grades at all. Students earn (or don't) them.
- If you were a “little too smart” you would realize that the only thing that will get you a bad grade is being pretty stupid or pretty lazy. You seem to be under some misguided belief that I have a bag of grades and I start handing out A’s B’s and C’s at my own discretion. You earn your grade buddy boy, I don’t give it to. If you are too stupid to read the assignment, or to lazy to do it correctly don‘t come crying to me that you didn’t get your “A”. There are plenty of student’s that I don’t like, there are plenty that I do like. There are some I don‘t think belong in college. However since I am a fully formed functioning adult I am able to set personal feelings aside and grade the assignment not the student. If someone I dislike turns in crap work and fails I look at it as karma biting them in their self-entitled ass!
- I don't use grades to punish someone because I don't like them, unless I don't like them because they're a plagiarizing, Wikipedia-copying moron. I spend so little actual time thinking about how much I like or dislike individual students, that the idea of punishing a student because I don't like them is absurd. And the suggestion that we do that regularly or even often is downright offensive. I have given bad grades, however, to students who are borderline and act like absolute assholes. That seems fair to me.
- Students often claim this, that we grade arbitrarily -- and it's a load of crap. It's an excuse to take responsibility off the idiot who can't put a subject together with a predicate, or memorize ten technical terms for a quiz, or read a book and look up the words you don't know. In other words, if you get a bad grade in my class, or in the class of most of the profs I know, you are an idiot. Nearly a vegetable, actually -- like a rutabaga, the tasteless nasty kind of vegetable no one likes.
- I tried to answer this with the best pedagogical tools—get the student to thing, turn the situation around, etc. My goodness was I disappointed. I asked, “Would a student give an instructor a bad evaluation because they didn’t like him? Would they get in the way of his success because he’s too smart, or not pretty enough?” You bet. I’ve received evals trashing me because I don’t iron my shirts, or because I insist that students learn vocabulary—in short, I receive punitive evaluation just about every term and there’s nothing I can do about it. Well, regardless of what my students do in evaluating me, I can assure you that I am always conscious of when I dislike a student, for whatever reason. I always ensure that my personal dislike for the student doesn’t enter into the grading process. In fact, I generally go out of my way to accommodate the asshats in my class, just to keep myself in check and to be sure everyone gets fair treatment.
- Sweetie, let me explain it to you as slowly and clearly as I can: ifyou earn low grades, it is because you don't do the work, don't apply yourself, and also don't give a shit. If you're too busy checking your manicure and re-arranging your hemline for the 1000th time in a50 minute class period, that's probably why. If you stopped twirling your hair long enough to take notes, or put down your compact mirror long enough to glance at the text, you might earn higher grades.Honestly. If you stopped using every waking minute of your day to plan out how much cleavage to display in the next week, you might find time to study.
- Many assignments have a certain amount of subjectivity to them. For example, there is no objective calculus for determining when an essay is worth a C rather than a C+, worth 66% rather than 67%. I can't speak for others, but when marking such assignments I tend to err on the side of generosity. However, when students are disrespectful or cheeky, this generosity goes out the window: these students go into my "shit list", and their assignments are given the lowest possible mark which is still nonetheless a fair assessment of their performance. Don't kid yourself that you can get put into the "shit list" for being too high spirited, too smart, or too pretty; you get put there because you've been an asshole.
