Even My Charitability Has Limits

Yes, I am not sure charitability is a word, but it has a better mouth feel than charitableness. So, I'm sticking with it. Time to talk about the end of semester blues. Early Morning in a Faraway Hotel For a bit of context, it's 7:00 AM, and I'm in a hotel room in Japan. I'm writing this article while heavily jetlagged, which should be an indicator that I should put the keyboard down. The problem is that the article I had planned for this week needs a little bit more time to polish. I could take the week off too, but I'm really frustrated with teaching again. So, I'm going to vent. Any idea what today's topic might be? Yes, it's about students. I know this is a topic is in poor taste. I'm the one who holds power over them, so I should be able to handle their criticism. The problem is: even my charitability has limits. How I Run My Class Rather than starting off with complaints, I want to share some context around how I conduct my work. I've written about my approach and philosophy of teaching several times on my site, but I can summarize it briefly. Broadly, I care deeply about community, so a fundamental part of the way I run my computer science courses is through discussion. Every lecture I do about 3-5 think-pair-share discussions where I ask students to chat about a topic before I explain it. As a part of my courses, there's also a lab component. Often, I treat these like office hours. Students can come to lab, work on it, and leave when they're done. If they want to stay and discuss a project or homework, they can. It's fairly flexible for them. When it comes to assessments, I don't have a lot of control there, but students are asked to complete 37 homeworks, 11 projects, and 3 exams. I also give them a little bit of credit for participation. Given the volume of assessments, I have a variety of ways of smoothing these over for students. For homeworks, I give students markdown templates, so they don't have to bother formatting their own homework. For exams, I hold a review session where I tell students what problems they will encounter. I also have an extra project, which they can use as a midterm replacement. For projects, they get to work in pairs, and I let them use tools like VS Code and GitHub. Even for participation, I give students a lot of flexibility. If they aren't coming to class, they can still earn participation by helping in online discussions and completing peer reviews. And just to help them a bit more, I am very big on self-advocacy. I will let anyone request anything from me, no questions asked. This allows students to request assignment extensions or alternative dates for exams. I want to empower students to take control of their own learning journey. All-in-all, I simultaneously give my students a lot of support while also giving them a lot of autonomy. For many students, this is a blessing; a nice change of pace. For others, they might've always relied on structure, so the relative lack of structure leads them to failure. Most Students Have No Problem Succeeding See, the thing is: almost all of my students succeed. I've spoken on this before, but I'm of the mind that I'd rather pass a student who should have failed than fail a student who should have passed. Therefore, I tend to be a bit more lenient to prevent the latter situation. To prove it to you, I just have to show you my grades. Here's the breakdown for one of my sections this semester: A: 19 A-: 11 B+: 2 B: 7 B-: 1 C+: 0 C: 1 C-: 0 D+: 0 D: 0 D-: 0 E: 0 In other words, 30 out of 41 students received at least 3.7 grade points. That's nearly three quarters of the whole class. As a result, you can probably imagine how the other faculty perceive me. It's the reason I had to switch back to paper exams. The department felt I was making the class too easy for them. The Grade Obsession Despite how good grades turned out, I've never received more emails or criticism from students in my life. At the time of writing, I've only submitted grades for two sections (or about 80 students). Yet, I've received complaints from eight of them (and one more since I started writing this). Sure, that's only about 10% of them, but it's a very vocal minority. Some have been kind, but others have been pretty rude. Of the list, six of them were in the A- camp, who were either begging for an A or were arguing for an A. On the nicer end, I basically just had students asking if there was a way to fix any project grades to try to get them over the hump. Toward the middle of the distribution, I had students misinterpret some of my policies to try to get a better grade. Then, on the rude end, I had students accuse me of grading their exam incorrectly, such as this one: I hope your having a nice day. Could you please show me the grading for my final exam im sorry but I studied a lot and I don't think I got a 78 . Also could you please tell me why I got a ¾ on participation? I showed up to almost every lecture and I believe you said that as long as you know my name and I participate in class I would get a 4/4? Is there anything I can clarify I only need an 83 on the exam and I know my handwriting is terrible so I know it may have been hard to read and id like to clarify. Perhaps this is kind by other educator's standards. I don't really get "mean" emails from students. That said, I'd prefer they had just asked me to see the exam, rather than accusing me of grading it incorrectly. In any case, I'm fallible, so I went back and checked. It was totally deserved. 10 of their 22 missed points weren't even up for debate; they missed five multiple choice questions. But Wait, There's More! Anyway, this all left a sort of bad taste in my mouth, with so many students questioning their grades. I'm certainly not excited to post the last section's grades, even though they did the best on the final. What actually set me off and got me to write this post was my RateMyProfessor score. I check it periodically against my better judgment, but mostly because a student of mine recently wrote a joke review. He put in a 1/5, but the review was all praise for me. Other students started submitting similar joke reviews. I was having a somewhat good time with it, but the reviews slowly shifted from bad-score-but-good-description to bad-score-bait-description. In the latter category, students were pretending to write mean things about me before making like a subtle nod about how I like a certain anime or something. Even these were somewhat hurtful, right? Because the "bait" portion of the description included real things I do, like how I often base participation on whether I know a student's name. And then eventually, one of the reviews left out the bait. It currently reads: Grifski is extremely knowledgeable, but he gets on tangents all the time which means he doesn't get through all the lecture material. Be prepared to learn the material on your own time through the hour long homeworks due each day. The way you complete course material is different from all the other professors, so it is hard to get help. This is a 1/5 review. I know I shouldn't be annoyed by it, but it doesn't reflect the reality of the space I cultivate at all. Do I go on tangents? Sure, but I find that to be a feature, not a bug. Is it important that we hit every last bit of content? No. Also, my class is discussion-based, so my tangents are only a fraction of a fraction of my teaching. I find it odd to also say that because I go on tangents, students have to teach themselves using the homeworks. It's particularly odd because most of the homeworks directly feed into the lab, which are ran like every other section of the course (i.e., you can just come to the lab if you're getting it). Not to mention that the homework assignments are graded on completion, so you can just put something down and come to lab for help anyway. I also take is with "it's hard to get help." What does this mean? In a course built on community, the help is everywhere. You would have to be actively avoiding your peers in discussions, the labs, and my office hours. Not to mention, we have an online community where you can get your questions answered at all hours of the day. To me, it sounds like someone who wasn't even willing to try. It's the learned helplessness that I think we're doomed to see as more AI is integrated into the education system. Hell, I even take issue with "the way you complete course material." It's all the same material. You could not have a course where the sections were more aligned than this. Are they taking issue with the homework templates? Are they having trouble transitioning from Eclipse to VS Code? Like I want to be able to support them, but this line screams "skill issue." Ultimately, I'm confused why you would even include the complement up front, if you're just going to give a 1/5. Like, commit to the bit, brother. What I find particularly funny about this review is that they admitted they earned a B. It's a solid grade by the way, but apparently they were expecting an A. Of course, if you saw the distribution above, you know a B is likely in the bottom quarter of my course. They would probably be failing in any other section. Also, just because I find it funny, they're kind of doxxing themselves when they admit they got a B. There were only 7 of those in one of my sections. In the other section, there were only 3 of them. We're talking about 10 people that could be the author here. Part of me thinks it could be one of three of them, two of which are in my later section where I do tend to go off script. But, most of those Bs rarely came to class. Catharsis Anyway, I'm not trying to hunt down whoever wrote this review, but I'm always struck by how little charitability I am offered in exchange for how much I offer. At least writing these articles is cathartic. Too bad there is so much (justified) social stigma around complaining about students. Otherwise, I would make this post public. With that said, thanks for reading. It's 8:30 AM, and I'd like to get my things together before we head out for a tour of Akihabara. Thanks for reading!