u/MyFaceSaysItsSugar

I had a student today who doesn’t understand why her exam grade went down. Their lowest exam score gets dropped. She had a D on her first exam, As on the next two exams and a C today. So it went from being an average of 2 As to being an average of two As and a C. She thought it should be a 91. I had a previous student wonder which of two grades were correct. One was how many points she got out of 80. The other was the percent grade. I explained that and her response was “but which one affects my grade?” The LMS also confuses them. They complain that their lowest grade was supposed to be dropped but they still see their lowest grade (because it’s still there, it just doesn’t affect their average).

It wouldn’t be a big deal except that they come to me under the impression that some injustice has happened making their grade wrong. That and these are health science students. At some point they’re going to have to figure out medication dose conversions and how many ml to draw up from a bottle based on how many mg of medication the patient needs.

This student approached me the first week of the semester, explaining they had a mystery medical issue and wanted to talk about absences (that’s what my university requires, students with attendance accommodations have to make a plan that we sign off on). The exam comes around and they send me an email that they’re in the hospital and ask to take the exam remotely with video proctoring. I make the bad decision of allowing it and the student winds up cheating the whole way through. They haven’t taken an exam since then. They keep missing even the make up exams.

Now they want me to allow them to take all make up and remaining exams from home and have a note from some kind of healthcare practitioner (not an MD or DO or even NP) attesting to the fact that they need that. The student wants to know what they can do to show me that I can trust them. That train not only left the station, it’s catastrophically derailed. That doctor’s note can get sent to the accommodations office for them to deal with and even if they decide the request is reasonable, it’s not going to be retroactive.