The Girl-Geek Anthropologist

It is probably a universal thing about junior faculty to struggle with final grades. This is my sixth course teaching on my own, and everytime I have to give out grades, I really fight with it.

There are some students who I know are A students, and deserve it.

There are those who are stellar A students, but have a bad exam worth a large percentage of their final grade, and barely make a B+.*

There are those who are more towards B than As, but I know they're working hard. So that's a tough call.

There are those who are B students, and are happy with that. That's fine. Those are easy to grade.

C students do the bare minimum to pass the class, which is fine too.

I hate borderline grades because then I have to make the call.

Then there are stupid students who go into the final with A for an average, and then proceed to plagiarize on their take-home final exam. As if that wasn't bad enough, this student actually plagiarized me, her professor! That's truly a first for me. This person followed arguments and statistics that I have published online before, and used exact sentences and paragraphs and did not bother citing anything. Additionally, she copied grammatical errors from an Amnesty International site that was Google translated from Czech into English.

My mind cannot fully comprehend that one. I don't know what must have been running through her head. Probably something along the lines of "hell with this. I'm graduating, I don't care". She ended up with a C in the course, because I failed her on an exam that was worth 12% of her final grade. If she would not have been graduating, I would have brought disciplinary actions against her.

I'm not sure I'll ever understand this one. But, it will make a good story down the line.

I survived my first semester in this private. The average for the course, B, was the lowest I had ever gotten in any of the courses I taught. I don't know if that's because I was getting harder, or the quality of the work was mediocre.

Then again, I have to keep reminding myself that C is average. Many (most?) people are happy to be average, so I have to accept that, and move on.

All in all, I find grading truly annoying, and anguishing at times.

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* This semester, I the best student, and best writer in any of my classes. This person's work was so polished, and so well argued, that by the end, she just made the whole class worth teaching. She got what I was talking about, and synthesized it very well. But, she failed her mid-term because of some personal issues, and while she would have normally gotten at least a 98-99% (yes, she's that good), she ended up with 88%. This makes me very sad. But, it would be very unfair to the rest of the students if I gave her an A. I hate making these calls