Don't like your grade? SUE.
 

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-te...to-3128943.php

QUOTE - Karla Ford and Jonathan Chan expected to be spending this year studying legal briefs and litigation as second-year law students at Texas Southern University's Thurgood Marshall School of Law. Instead, last spring, both students were dismissed after getting a D grade in their Contracts II course.
Now, the two are suing the school and their former professor, saying their final grade was "arbitrary and capricious."


I don't see why the school doesn't let them see their exams - but if 50% is class performance they are probably TOL. Legal eagles, what say you?

From the article: Holley noted that final grades are determined by a complex formula in which instructors award points by ranking students according to class performance. That counts for 50 percent of the final grade, with a uniform, multiple-choice exam counting for the other half. The exams are evaluated by an outside contractor, who also calculates the final grade.

When they say 'ranking students according to class performance,' do they mean that students are pitted against each other, and that each student represents a specific place in the class rank (as in 5th of 50)? Or do they mean that students who perform to X level receive X rank, and all the students in the class could technically have the same rank?

Regarding the students not being permitted to see the exams, I wonder if the outside contractor who evaluates the exams still has possession of them. ??

Yuck @ the whole thing, though. Without knowing the ins and outs of law school, I'm hesitant to take a side. Was there a syllabus? Does it outline the grading system? Could the students have checked on their progress in the 'class performance' portion of their grade? If so, did they? There are just so many holes here.

I date back to the days when grades were based 100% on the final exam, which was graded on a curve.

And I'm really trying to get my mind around the idea of anyone other than the professor grading exams. If that's the norm now, times have definitely changed.

Beyond that, it's hard to make any judgments about this without seeing the complaint and actually knowing what the claims are. On one hand the article seems to suggest that the grading system is arbitrary, but elsewhere there seems to be some suggestion that these two students were targeted to be "curved out."

Those times are still here at most law schools. Texas Southern isn't typical in any way. And your job prospects coming out of there at the bottom of the class...the school's doing its students a favor by forcing them to cut their losses after an unsuccessful first year.

Thanks for the info. It's a school I know nothing about.

I find it unsurprising that they got D's in contract law, if they think this is a legitimate suit.

The irony of suing because you received a D in contract law did not escape me.

Upon first glance, I rolled my eyes at this, but the "complex formula," outside grading, and lack of transparency re: the test is odd to me. Where is the harm in "Hey, I got a D. Can we go over the test so I know where I dropped the ball"?

I'm not sure about grading in law school, but it seems alarming that one grade would drop your average that low. Their overall performance must have been lacking, in which case this is not much of a shocker.

If they were part-time students, a 4-hour D would be > 1/3 of their GPA. Kind of hard to recover from that. Law schools are free to grade however the hell they want to. Classroom performance is a valid way to grade.

I always thought classes where classroom performance counted were better classes. Students were better prepared on a daily basis. Otherwise, you could prepare some days, volunteer like hell, then blow off reading some other time and sit back and take good notes, or not even that.

Towards your 3L year, there's not a significant relationship between your ability to be ready for class from day to day and your ability to get ready for the final, or at least there wasn't for me.

Not law school, not Texas, but today, my crazy professor added new requirements to our first 10 page paper under his clause that he may change the syllabus at any time, with or without notice to the students. So what? I would agree, except that the paper was due TWO DAYS AGO. He changed the requirements and docked everybody 10 points for not meeting the new requirements. My head is spinning with this idiot. I would like to sue him.

How ... in the hell ...

Our thoughts exactly. When he was questioned on it by one student, the student received a reply that went something like this:

"Do you really want me to get out of my recliner, put down my beer, put aside my Playboy magazine and go to my computer to give your paper a second read through? I will use a sharper pencil and find more of your errors and I won't be as forgiving of them this time. Please tell me no."

I am trying very hard not to let this man stress me out, but he is IMPOSSIBLE.

I would SOOO DEFINITELY COMPLAIN to the Dean and post it in the student newspaper if there is one.

I know what the title of this means, but every time I look at it I think "why do you have to come at me like that?" :D

The department chair has been notified. She told that student that she would wait for corroboration from more students. I'm going to see her at an auditors professional org meeting next week so I'm going to talk to her privately and clue her in to this clown.

What an assclown! Please tell me this idiot emailed this response and the student who received it saved it somewhere. If this person didn't do so, have the school pull that message off the server and you've got some serious ammo against this jerk.

I am taking a statistics class. As I was looking at my grades so far this semester (the grades are posted online online in the Moodle for the course) I noticed that the Pre-Test grade was listed with a value beside it, and it appeared to count in the overall average. This didn't seem likely- the pretest was what we took before the course started, supposedly so the professor could see what we already knew about statistics. Silly me decided to ask the professor if the pretest was part of our average. Her answer: Yes. :eek:

So I made a 60% on the pretest, and am now spending the entire semester clawing my way up from an F. Not sure how this is fair. But I will wait until after final grades are posted to talk to the department chair about this. I don't want her being mad at me for questioning this to influence how she grades my stuff the rest of the semester. :confused:

The student who received that message forwarded it to the department chair. He was freaking out last night though, worried, as tcsparky posted above, that there will be grade repercussions in the future because of it.

tcsparky: I would be upset if a pre-test like that was included in my grades also. unless she's going to somehow measure against it with the final to determine what you've learned over the course of the term. If you could get an A on the pre-test, then you didn't really need the class, right?

My Business Ethics class had a professor fired for just this type of behavior. En masse we went to the Dean. Unfortunately, though the professor was fired, they simply took the easy way out and gave everyone a "B" for the semester.

I'm teaching a management class for the first time right now. There are so many things that I would love to change mid-stream, but what's on the syllabus is on the syllabus. For example, I accept late homework with a penalty of 10% per day. This was a bad move, because we discuss the homework in class on the day it is due, so students can listen to the discussion, take notes, and turn it in. So, it sucks, but all I can do is chalk it up to a learning experience, and fix it next time.

Ironically, the "rule" he changed was something I had emailed him about in advance, because I wasn't sure what to do with my page numbers. He posted this modified APA style that he wants us to use and one of his modifications is "no running headers". So I emailed him and asked where he wanted page numbers to go since they are supposed to be in the running header, flush right. He replied he wanted them at the bottom, center and said he meant to put that in the syllabus. Thing is, he never did. So I'm the only one who ever got this information. I didn't realize he never put it in the syllabus either.

Today, he sent out this email to the whole class:

The grades are in and complete for Essay 1. I commented on and emailed most of you about your grades, so you should all know.

How/why did I grade some things a certain way?

Okay, lets start with the syllabus. In the syllabus just after the APA modification section I note that I will take off 10 points for each infraction of the APA style, with the mods I listed. In none of your papers did I take off 10 points for 1 specific APA style failure. Most often I took 5 points, a few times I took off 3.

I had one, maybe two students ask where to put the page number. I thought I had told you all and I did take 5 points off many papers for that infraction. Then I discovered I had not told you. (I fixed that error immediately).

So, yes, I _could_ go back and fix my error. But then I'd have to fix my other error - you know, where I took off only 5 points, not 10, for APA infractions?

Lets examine the points - say you had 2 APA infractions and the page number location problem for a total of 15 points off. I _could_ go back and add on the 5 points, but then I'd have to fix the other 2 five point deductions make them 10 points off, each. You would then have 20 points off, but none deducted for the page number thing... you tell me what you want me to do.

References - yes, I am a stickler for your references to be correct. AND you MUST use primary references, not secondary. You cannot quote a quote of a quote. You must not write "Thomas Jefferson said that Benjamin Franklin said a penny saved is a penny earned". You must not cite it like this (Jefferson, T., 1779, pg. 3, para 5). That quote is only correct if it looks like this: "a penny saved is a penny earned" (Franklin, 1778, pg. 2, para. 1). In this instance I am quoting the primary source.

Climbing Mt. Everest: the better you are the harder it gets. Grading - I read every paper. Good papers I read slower, excellent papers I read the slowest. The more time I put into a paper the closer I look at it, I look for points to take off. So, if you got a 75 or so, that means it was easy for me to find things you need improvement in. An 85 means you are doing pretty good and you need to fine tune some areas. A 95 means pay more attention to detail. And there was only 1 - 100 paper, which in this class means, I'm not going to spend any more time looking for obvious mistakes. Someone else probably grades harder, but I do put a lot of effort into for you.

How are we doing as a class? Actually, pretty much according to plan. Five of you are in the 90s. Five of you are 84 - 90 and the other 5 need to put more work in. If you are below a 70 you really need to work hard the second half of the class.

Questions?

Any guesses who got the 100? :)

Wow what an ass.

In response to the OP, I was thinking about a couple of my first year exams that I asked to review after grades came out. Even having access to the exams, I couldn't tell you how it is that I got the grade that I got. Everything is on a curve, so how on earth can I know how accurate my grade was without actually seeing everyone's exams? Also, there were hardly any notes or comments written on the exams. One of them didn't have a single comment, so I was just reading my own words and a number that was assigned to them by the prof.

Just saying this to illustrate that having access to your exams is not always even remotely helpful in understanding why you got the grade that you got. After my first 5 semesters of law school, I strongly believe that my grades have much less to do with how well I perform than with how well everyone else performs. I've written some exams that I knew were perfectly awful and gotten decent grades, by which I surmise that my classmates' exams were even worse than mine. :) (For example, I got a B+ last semester on an exam that I guessed on over half of it because the questions were about obscure things that were barely talked about for a fraction of a single class period, and I didn't bother studying them. Guess no one else did, either!)

Also, for those who aren't familiar with law school grading, I will note that the mandatory curve for first year students at my school is tougher than that for upper level students. I think this is fairly common. In other words, it is much harder to get a higher grade in a 1L class than in a 2L or 3L class, because the overall class average must be significantly lower when the professor turns in grades. If you can't keep up in law school, as someone else mentioned, it's much better to find out your first year than to pay for three years and not be able to get a job at the end. They really do try to weed people out in that first year. Sucks to be one of those people, but it would suck worse to be strung along and not have any chance at paying back the loans at the end.

wooo, way to go AGDee! he does sound like a terrible professor though.

He is. I'm still going to let the department chair know my thoughts about this man, with some evidence for her to see. I think that actually means more coming from the one who got the 100 than from someone who is upset about their grade.

I would think so, too. Congrats!

And I wish someone could send him a grade for the grammar in his email. "Good papers I read slower . . . So, if you got a 75 or so, that means it was easy for me to find things you need improvement in. An 85 means you are doing pretty good and you need to fine tune some areas." Oy. :rolleyes:

Do you know how long this loser has been teaching? In other words, is he some young punk trying to prove a point or is he a tenured professor trying to prove a point? If this guy is tenured, he will probably only get a slap on the wrist, unfortunately.

He's an adjunct, but not a young punk.. he's in his 60's.

That is why he thinks he is invensible (I know that's not how you spell it out spell check didn't work. )

The outside grading thing was odd to me as well. At my law school, while some professors would seek input from their TAs, all of them did the final grading. I wonder how many schools use outside services.