More syllabus woes. This time Patty... getting email after email from her students about our absence policy... sighing and whingeing all the while (her and the students). Every unexcused absence beyond 4 our first year students get docked 3 points from their final course grade (out of 100). Additionally it says that absence documentation, if there is any, must be submitted upon the student's return to class.
Pretty fucking ironclad if you ask me. Which is why I wrote it that way (with the express approval - by the way - of Patty and Helga in our meeting last summer).
So I've been grading and working all day listening to Patty get no less than 4 phone calls from various students freaking out about the absence points and trying to turn in late documentation... which Patty is accepting. Now that's fine: going more lenient than the syllabus says is completely at the discretion of each instructor. Her turning to me every so often and complaining about how whiney the students are, etc., and how she doesn't see why they think they can turn in late documentation, is more the issue. The reason they are contacting you and expecting you to bend the printed rule is because you've been doing so all morning (all semester in fact - this is the person who had a nearly identical twin of our final on her desk last week with "Final Exam Review" written at the top - patent copies of every single exercise from the final exam throughout - ostensibly for handing out and or doing together in class - so her being lenient about the absences doesn't surprise me in the least).
The clincher was my return from lunch to find an email msg from her and she turned around at her desk when I came in: "Did you get my email? I just didn't want to forget to mention it." It asked if I could make the absence excuse documentation turn-in time more concrete on the syllabus for next semester - like give them a time limit or something. I turned back to her after reading it and with as straight a face and matter-of-fact a tone as possible said, "All three first year level syllabi say that absence docs need to be turned in on the student's first day back in class but I can reword it somehow if you have a more specific way to state it?" (I can't even type it with a matter-of-fact tone - no idea how I managed to get it to sound casual in person but somehow I did.) Patty: "Oh, really? Well I guess that's pretty definite then."
Yeah. Pretty definite. The indefinite part comes in when YOU mess with the policy. Then you're on your own, chica.
It's all in the presentation. My own students have not had a single thing to say about unexcused absences. I posted them on WebCT last week with a reminder of the syllabus policy "Don't forget to subtract 3 points for every UE off your final course grade. I will be doing it manually before posting your letter grades to the Registrar's site." One person wrote me to verify the dates and then very respectfully wrote back, "OK, you're right. I didn't realize they had added up so much."
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