petty (which comes from French, and which, yes, I do mean as a double-entendre... which comes from French also :)

So every time someone writes about fucking Quia (online workbook medium) it's because they got an answer wrong on an activity and later figured out their mistake but accidentally typed the same thing on the subsequent try, or they think it's being overly picky on something that wasn't crucial to the current language skillset, or (rarely) it really is grading that one answer wrong...

We're talking one answer out of maybe 8-10 on one activity out of about 25 actvities per chapter out of 5 chapters all of whose Quia homework adds up to a mere 10% of the final grade.

I did languages in college :) not math but I think that means that each individual answer is worth about 1/1000th of their final grade, a.k.a. just a hair more than Jack Shit.

It is a well-known phenomenon, beyond all this, that the people who complain the most about these insignificant teensy answers are the ones who (a) think they know so much French they don't have to pay attention in class and (b) probably do have a good enough average that a dorky answer problem here and there on Quia (or 50 such answer problems – or way more) –will never in a thousand years cause them to drop below the A or B range in which they are normally mired for the duration.

So imagine my satisfaction today when one such female student writes about one such answer on one such activity.... on Quia and asks me please to adjust her grade (I forgot to mention that just finding the activity they are talking about takes a few emails back and forth since they rarely give you enough info to find the activity in question). I decided to humor her because I had been feeling SO vitriolic towards her the other day I felt I needed to do some kind of penance so I can get my inner-thought karma clean again... kinda.

I finally find the activity she means and lo and behold it is one where I had ALREADY SET THE GRADING TO BE BASED ON COMPLETION ONLY not on accuracy.

It's one of those cases where you would have a hard time keeping a straight face if it was in person; one of those times when explaining what the person overlooked invariably sounds like sarcasm or mockery because the explanation is so incredibly basic.

Meredith, I think if you look at your grade for that activity you'll find it is only grading on completion anyway and that you already had received 10 out of 10 on it.

I will still endeavor to be nicer in my head, but next time she gives me that I'm-bored-and-you-are-nowhere-near-as-funny-as-you-think-you-are look, I'm just going to smile and remember that she is nowhere near as intelligent as either of us thought she was.