Professors don’t always understand the pressure on students to get good grades. If you shoot an email to your professor asking him or her to glance over an assignment that was harshly graded, he or she interprets your request as a demand to slaughter his or her first-born son — or worse, admit he or she was wrong.
Midterm grades were due at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, leaving most students uneasy. But this queasiness goes further than the average slacker who just realized his or her C in geography is actually a D.
This relates to a majority of hard-working students who are constantly overworked and overstressed.
One in five undergraduates say they are constantly stressed, according to a study conducted for The Associated Press. The other four are probably just moderately stressed.
Anxiety pushes us to try and fix the source of our problems. For college students, the problem is our grades — where professors jump off board and leave students scrambling on deck.
Parents and advisers constantly encourage us to communicate with our professors and work together to resolve issues. But unless these issues involve praising their latest lecture or agreeing with their unfair salaries, professors don’t want to hear it.
Not all professors are as conceited as I am depicting them, and I appreciate the ones who work with students to find a solution. But the stingy professors are ruining the reputation for the rest of them.
They tell us things like we should have worked harder earlier in the semester. In some cases this is true, but other times teachers are generalizing the student body as whining grade-grubbers.
“You were two points away from getting an A in the class and I messed up inputting your test grade? Forget it, you should’ve come to me the day after the test. What’s that? I didn’t upload the grades to Moodle until last night? Oh, well, uh, you should’ve come to my office hours this morning at 8 a.m. Oh, you had another class to attend? Well, uh, my class should be your No. 1 priority.”
Sound familiar?
Sometimes it feels like professors refuse to hear out students’ grade inquiries solely because they are too lazy to make the changes or too proud to admit to an unfair grade.
It’s especially stressful for students here on scholarships or TOPS who have to keep a certain GPA all year. Teachers forget that for these students, the extra point they are asking about could be the determining factor in $3,338 — almost a semester’s worth of in-state tuition.
In other cases, students are struggling just to get into their undergrad college. The Manship School of Mass Communication requires all members to achieve a 3.0 GPA to get accepted. This is sometimes harder than it looks when you take on a heavy course load and attempt to balance a social life and enough sleep.
So we managed to get through the first half of the semester with little sleep and average grades, but now the stress returns as finals inch closer and the process repeats. Professors will say the same things they said before midterm grades were due, and students will cry at the cruelty of this world.
We need a common ground.
Keren Henderson, mass communication professor, has a refreshing outlook on her position.
“As a doctoral student, I appreciate the stress that goes along with juggling life, work and school. As an instructor, I wish that all of my students would make my class their top priority. The only way I can think to reconcile the two is to tell my students that I am open to reasonable grade appeals,” Henderson said in an email.
This is the approach more professors should adopt if they want to help the common student avoid their scheduled mental breakdown.
It’s a two-way street, I realize, but some professors think it’s a five-lane, one-way highway.