Arguing with a professor

[lost__in__space]

Has anyone done this? When a professor has been unfair to you, has anyone argued with them over marks? Do you think that they will penalize you later on (consciously or unconsciously?) i.e. in marking an essay, something that is subjective? Did you find it was worth it?

 

In my case: my professor asked for a 5 page summary but didn't specify how it had to be done or what it needed to look like, nothing is written in her guideline document. When she marked us (and THEN presented us the rubric, she didn't give it to us before) she is now penalizing us if we didn't present it as a handout with visuals, colours, etc. She is also penalizing us for submitting the wrong comments on an online project where you submit assessments of other people's work, when it's not even due yet but she won't let us retake our comments online (even though its not stated anywhere that once we submit it we cannot edit it and we had no clue to that before pressing the submit button and once again its nowhere in her guideline documents or syllabus).

 

She's a pretty crabby professor and never thinks she's wrong. I've had a lot of problems with her before but have never had to argue with her before. My friend insists that she'll have a vendetta against you once you do (as was her personal experience last year). I will talk to her after class and see what she says. What do I do if she continues to be unfair?

 

Has anyone's problems ever escalated to their dean or ombudsman?

[japlanet]

Stuff like this, I've found is par for the course, especially with biology labs. The question/assignment either asks for one thing or doesn't specify what to include, and then you are docked significant marks for not doing something that they never asked for (and wouldn't be immediately obvious to anyone).

 

Sometimes, when I thought it really unfair, I'd just point out that they never asked for x,y,z, so how they expect us to know to include it. Often they don't care, basically I find many people are of the attitude that it that's how THEY interpret/would answer a question, well, clearly, that's how anyone would.

[sparkles3288]

I've had it happen to me a lot. Most of the time it's a losing battle because they have the final say.

 

The only time I got really into it is once I had this bio lab that was due and it had specific questions to answer in which they even gave us ideal answer examples. We all followed it and our TA was insane and gave us allaround 50% for following EXACTLY what the instructions were.

 

I blew a fuse and went to the head coordinator/professor/other superiors and it took about 2 weeks of arguing (by this time it was a matter of principle) and all the marks got changed. I don't recommend going through all that work since usually it won't matter.

[NewfieMike]

I've argued any test question that was marked wrong but I had evidence it was right (text book quote, lecture slide) I've seen. Even if it gets me an extra 1-2%, I do it out of principle of being penalized for studying the correct material. In fact I'm doing it tomorrow morning haha.

 

I should note that I do not argue questions that "they were looking for more than what I wrote but I feel that my answer deserves more credit." That's just them marking by their answer key, and it's fair that I lost the points. Only when I truly believe that marking me wrong contradicts a previously stated fact.

 

You raise an interesting point though, one I was talking about with a friend today. I'm taking a physiology course that's offered through our faculty of medicine but it's considered credit for a biochem degree. The course is team-taught by a variety of researchers in medicine. There's no doubt in my mind that a few of them are adcom members. Today we had a public exam viewing of our last test (had a really terrible section with ambiguous questions) and a girl (who is a gunner for med school) was literally shouting at the coordinator of the course to re-evaluate the tests. While we all believed the test was unfair, I can't see this attitude helping this girl when it comes down to the adcom deciding if she'd be a proper fit for their medical school. I mean, why would they want to take a student who will lose her **** because of a bad test?

[DOC_Ma]

Has anyone done this? When a professor has been unfair to you, has anyone argued with them over marks? Do you think that they will penalize you later on (consciously or unconsciously?) i.e. in marking an essay, something that is subjective? Did you find it was worth it?

 

In my case: my professor asked for a 5 page summary but didn't specify how it had to be done or what it needed to look like, nothing is written in her guideline document. When she marked us (and THEN presented us the rubric, she didn't give it to us before) she is now penalizing us if we didn't present it as a handout with visuals, colours, etc. She is also penalizing us for submitting the wrong comments on an online project where you submit assessments of other people's work, when it's not even due yet but she won't let us retake our comments online (even though its not stated anywhere that once we submit it we cannot edit it and we had no clue to that before pressing the submit button and once again its nowhere in her guideline documents or syllabus).

 

She's a pretty crabby professor and never thinks she's wrong. I've had a lot of problems with her before but have never had to argue with her before. My friend insists that she'll have a vendetta against you once you do (as was her personal experience last year). I will talk to her after class and see what she says. What do I do if she continues to be unfair?

 

Has anyone's problems ever escalated to their dean or ombudsman?

 

everytime when I get 89% some bump some don't but they always bump a 49% to a 50% so why not 89% to 90%?

[tennisball80]

Bump

 

I wanna know if its worth to argue with a professor in university or not.

[DOC_Ma]

But with your problem, I don't think you can do much about it if the prof keeps being unfair to u. next time you should check on their ratings maybe on ratemyprofessors.com before you choose a course, profs make huge difference on what mark you get.

[THX]

Evaluate your risk/reward. Is this mark going to affect your future? If yes, then politely talk to her and point out your concerns regarding the marking scheme. If it has little impact on your year and you are simply grasping for a few extra percent, don't bother - it's not worth it. She might old a vendetta against you, but more than likely nothing will change and you will have wasted your time.

[dbjones]

I just had a similar situation. For a social science course we had to write about a certain topic. I found out I got a 60% on it. Surprised, I set up an appointment with the prof to go through it together. Viewing it, there were no grammar errors, no structural essay mistakes, proper citations, etc. Then I get to the final section, and I see tons of red ink. I lost 40% due to a statement that in her mind was unethical and politically incorrect. When in fact, I was just presenting a recurrent theme I found in several journals related to my topic. I asked her politely why I would loose marks for something that I was merely presenting, I mean why kill the messenger? In the end of her rambling, she used the statement " this is why I am the prof. and you are the student".

From this I clearly got the point that it is futile to argue with her and any subsequent work in the course would most likely be graded with the utmost scrutiny. So what I am trying to say, is if he/she is a real arrogant, bigot/b1tch/assh0le then it's not worth it. Most likely, they have the power and you are fighting a battle that cannot be won.

[Lactic Folly]

Try approaching with the attitude that you just want to learn from your mistakes, really want to improve your performance in the class, and clarify requirements for future assignments as much as possible..

[Mei_Mei_girl]

Haha, in a way its good to know others have had these kind of experiences too. I generally like to maintain good relations with people, but in some few cases I've gone to argue with professors when things were just clearly unfair. When I did it it made me feel like a monster since the proff insisted "you are complaining about a very fair scenario, etc., etc.". But you know when you work your butt off and so much depends on those grades (and by the way, YOU are paying the proffs out of your pocket), somethings I just can't let go.

 

And proffs (especially I find if they are tenured) usually don't really care much about the grades they assign in my experiences. But we do!!

[dbjones]

Try approaching with the attitude that you just want to learn from your mistakes, really want to improve your performance in the class, and clarify requirements for future assignments as much as possible..

 

This is a good way to deal with IMO. Putting on a smile and try to look forward to the next assignment and adhere to your professor, that is try to accommodate to him/her. In fact, just the fact you approached him/her and showed the effort of trying to understand what to do better will generally earn approval with most profs and lead to better marks subsequently. But of course, other situations warrant other courses of action.

[future_doc]

Evaluate your risk/reward. Is this mark going to affect your future? If yes, then politely talk to her and point out your concerns regarding the marking scheme. If it has little impact on your year and you are simply grasping for a few extra percent, don't bother - it's not worth it. She might old a vendetta against you, but more than likely nothing will change and you will have wasted your time.

 

Well said! If I were a prof., I would give you an A+.

[lost__in__space]

Thought I'd update on the situation.

 

Right before I was going to talk to her, luckily for me, some students in the class gave her a gift for volunteering for some project of theirs (it was quite a nice gift) and she was in a very good mood. She said she'd look into allowing us to edit our comments and would allow us to if the tech department can change the settings. This is confusing though because I forgot to mention in my original post, that I had emailed her about a few days ago about this (this meeting was going to be my SECOND attempt at trying to convince her) and her response via email was that it was too bad, so sad and that I shouldn't even be asking her these kinds of things and to post it to the discussion board.......yet she changes her mind completely on 2nd attempt.... sigh. Good news for me but she's so inconsistent it makes me blow my lid.

[dbjones]

Thought I'd update on the situation.

 

Right before I was going to talk to her, luckily for me, some students in the class gave her a gift for volunteering for some project of theirs (it was quite a nice gift) and she was in a very good mood. She said she'd look into allowing us to edit our comments and would allow us to if the tech department can change the settings. This is confusing though because I forgot to mention in my original post, that I had emailed her about a few days ago about this (this meeting was going to be my SECOND attempt at trying to convince her) and her response via email was that it was too bad, so sad and that I shouldn't even be asking her these kinds of things and to post it to the discussion board.......yet she changes her mind completely on 2nd attempt.... sigh. Good news for me but she's so inconsistent it makes me blow my lid.

 

gifts/bribes FTW!

[tennisball80]

gifts/bribes FTW!

 

[lost__in__space]

 

LOLOLOL INDEED!!!!!!

[Kathryn]

 

Oh man. If only it was that simple.

[NLengr]

There's no doubt in my mind that a few of them are adcom members. Today we had a public exam viewing of our last test (had a really terrible section with ambiguous questions) and a girl (who is a gunner for med school) was literally shouting at the coordinator of the course to re-evaluate the tests. While we all believed the test was unfair, I can't see this attitude helping this girl when it comes down to the adcom deciding if she'd be a proper fit for their medical school. I mean, why would they want to take a student who will lose her **** because of a bad test?

 

Won't hurt her unless she:

1) Asks one of the profs for a reference

2) Is unlucky enough to get one for an interviewer.

 

The applications at MUN are blinded to the adcom. Each applicant is assigned a number, so as to prevent people from recognizing someones name.

 

In a slightly related topic, one of my buddies teaches at Western in one of the applied sciences. He says the amount of annoying undergrads he gets complaining that their crappy paper/exam should be marked higher is crazy. Even after he explains the marking breakdown and the requirements, they still try to do it. And even for stupid stuff like bumping a 79% to an 80% or a 59% to a 60%. I'm surprised he hasn't quit yet.

[Wolvenstar]

Has anyone done this? When a professor has been unfair to you, has anyone argued with them over marks? Do you think that they will penalize you later on (consciously or unconsciously?) i.e. in marking an essay, something that is subjective? Did you find it was worth it?

 

In my case: my professor asked for a 5 page summary but didn't specify how it had to be done or what it needed to look like, nothing is written in her guideline document. When she marked us (and THEN presented us the rubric, she didn't give it to us before) she is now penalizing us if we didn't present it as a handout with visuals, colours, etc. She is also penalizing us for submitting the wrong comments on an online project where you submit assessments of other people's work, when it's not even due yet but she won't let us retake our comments online (even though its not stated anywhere that once we submit it we cannot edit it and we had no clue to that before pressing the submit button and once again its nowhere in her guideline documents or syllabus).

 

She's a pretty crabby professor and never thinks she's wrong. I've had a lot of problems with her before but have never had to argue with her before. My friend insists that she'll have a vendetta against you once you do (as was her personal experience last year). I will talk to her after class and see what she says. What do I do if she continues to be unfair?

 

Has anyone's problems ever escalated to their dean or ombudsman?

 

 

Frankly I would go to the head of the department and complain. That sounds like bull and I would fight it. It is one thing to actually make a mistake but when teachers take off marks arbitrarily that is just wrong.

 

I have seen this soo much it is just painful. 2nd year chem labs do this and when you argue about it, they just say "who cares about marks, it is the learning that matters.".

 

I found the best situation I had was a bio/genetics class I took. One of the exam questions was to draw diagram of transcription. Rather simple considering I tutored 5 people in that class. Oddly enough I got 2 out of 14 marks on the question. Asked the teacher about it and compared my diagram with my girlfriends (whom I also tutored), and he couldn't find a difference with the diagrams (not surprising considering I taught it to her). He response after several hard seconds of thinking was to tell me that mine was "simply more wrong than hers, even though he couldn't put his finger on why.". She got 10 out of 14 marks btw.

 

That was my second semester in university, at that point I was still thinking that you make friends with all your professors. I had gone and talked to, and socialized with him several times before the test, even mentioning my hope to get into med school. The class after that midterm while looking me in the eye, he stated to the class that "I know several of you are interesting in trying out for medical school. this is the class where you will learn that you are not cut out for medical school."

 

I thought about fighting it and asked advice from another prof from the bio department I was on good terms with. He happened to be with the lab coordinator at the time, and they both told me that I could file a complaint but by the time it was reviewed any changes the department made would be too late and my marks would be already finalized. Turned out that was actually a lie, but I found out too late for me. Sadly enough the prof won a fellowship award last year. I switched out of the bio department and went over to psychology.

 

You really have to be careful, some profs think they are gods and thus can't be wrong, while others only want to do research and are bitter about being forced to teach.

 

 

 

 

 

Stuff like this, I've found is par for the course, especially with biology labs. The question/assignment either asks for one thing or doesn't specify what to include, and then you are docked significant marks for not doing something that they never asked for (and wouldn't be immediately obvious to anyone).

 

Sometimes, when I thought it really unfair, I'd just point out that they never asked for x,y,z, so how they expect us to know to include it. Often they don't care, basically I find many people are of the attitude that it that's how THEY interpret/would answer a question, well, clearly, that's how anyone would.

 

Lol a friend of mine from out of university ended up teaching a bio lab as a grad student. She found out that at my school in particular that is how they structure 2nd year bio labs. The lab profs think it will help the students learn better that way.