Several borderline grades in the 12h class so I'm sure I'm going to get a handful of emails promising their first born if I will just round up the points. Of course I'm not interested in their first born... I want CASH!
KIDDING!!!!!! That would be unethical plus I truly believe that each of them should receive the grade they earned. I know, the concept is something murky... :)
Lest you think all finals week instructor-student interaction is icky... Carrie, one of my few who religiously take extra steps was in this morning... She's a Dean's List candidate and wanted help with a plan of attack for tomorrow's exam so she can clinch her A. I don't think she'll have any problem but it's typical of her to come and see. Kind of a Cinderella story since she started out making a 68 on the first chapter test and hadn't had any French before. Usually with that scenario you can bank on the student's final grade of F. But Carrie dug in and came up steadily thru the semester; every test was slightly higher, ending with a near-miraculous 87 test average. Thanks to her diligence with homework and compos, she only needs an 83 on the final for her A, then she's off to grad. school next semester.
Same Going The Extra Mile attitude with Anita in yesterday's class who hasn't made anything lower than a 97 all fall, having had 5 years of French before. Still, she did every single homework assignment, came to class every day, visited office hours on occasion, did all the extra credit work this semester, plus the EC assignment that was due at the exam. Ended with a 100.7 overall average. Nothing wrong with academic overkill!
To clarify what I'm actually lauding here, Anita's behaviour is exemplary because of our high percentage of students who (the university allows to) take first-year French even tho they had umpteen years of it before and view it as the proverbial easy-A to boost their grade point average and set them up for a couple of cake semesters. Most of them find that this is not possible due to the pace and materials in our courses but some really do have enough French experience that they could just show up for tests and ace them pretty much. What they like to forget is that percentage of the grade which is dependent on all the components other than the tests, so usually they're in for a rude awakening towards the end of the semester (I'm not unhappy to say).
Anita's French was certainly strong enough to hold her in the A bracket even if she had neglected a good bit of the other materials and come to class considerably less. She still couldn't have blown off as much stuff as some of them think they're going to be able to in that situation with far less aptitude than she, but she could have afforded to slack off a fair amount and still pull an A. I happen to know she had an incredibly hard semester, with upper level chemistry, calculus and accounting courses in addition to mine, so she would have been entirely justified hedging her efforts a bit. The fact that she didn't is quite astounding indeed - or maybe not, knowing her, but in relation to our standard prior-experience student, it most certainly is.
Not to make it seem like I only appreciate the ones who rock at French, my heart does go out to the underdogs, contrary to how I normally sound in here. Many are the students like Braden, who struggled with everything, had solid C's and D's on tests. Where he broke with the norm was by doing every bit of the homework, coming to class each and every day and attending office hours before nearly every test. Likewise he did all the EC and managed to avoid the slippage that normally takes place with the strugglers (where they start out at B/C and slide down to D/F by the end of the semester, due to the cumulative effect of language material - like math - building constantly on the material from prior chapters)... I was delighted after finishing the grades for that section this morning to see he made a final av. of 80.3 by the skin of his teeth. Well earned, well deserved.
Nice to have tangible reminders that there IS integrity on the student side of things!
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