Dear Professors,
This letter certainly does not pertain to all of you, some of you are grading ninjas. However, too many of you are not so stellar. There are the professors who take 2 weeks to grade a scantron to the ones that take 2 months to grade a project to the ones that don’t even have a class page on Blackboard. We are BEGGING YOU, please do you job and get our hard work back to us!!
We understand that you are busy too. Many of you have families, other jobs, teach multiple classes, or have to complete research. But so do we. We have 4 other classes, jobs, internships, clubs, sports, social lives, and some students have families of their own too. We will not be greedy and ask for same day turn around, just a timely return to keep us up to date so we aren’t blind sided on finals week. I broke down the bad graders into 3 levels.
The Bad
You’re not that bad. You get us the work back before our next test. It’s been 2 weeks since I submitted that homework on Blackboard and a week since the last one. The work is piling up. If you don’t have time to grade it then stop assigning so many things! Chances are we aren’t going to put our full effort into the work when we know you’re not looking at it for weeks. And that TA you have, isn’t most of their job to help you grade? Help us out here!
The I’m Passing but…
At this point I think you lost the test we took a month ago. You have stopped answering our emails of questions about when the grades will be posted after weeks of telling us they would be up “tomorrow.” What are you doing in those office hours that no one comes to? Why can’t you grade then? My teacher’s in high school worked 8 hour days and got grades back to me in a quarter of the time and you work 9 hours a week teaching classes, please stop using busy as an excuse, that does not fly with overwhelmed college kids. I got a B on the first test and no feedback since then. Do I have an A or C, the world may never know.
The A or F it’s a toss up
It’s December and you don’t even have a Blackboard page. That project was due at the beginning of October. I have a midterm estimate and nothing else. SOS!!! You deserve angry parents who pay $42,000 a year to call you even though it’s against the law, but you probably don’t even have an office phone. If you get paid to do research, that’s cool and exciting and all, but if you can’t put any effort into the teacher part of your role then you should find something else to do. It is not fair to us to have no idea how we are doing in a class that we may need to graduate next week or a certain grade to keep a scholarship. If I can find time to do the assignments between 16 hours of class a week, 2 internships, a job, and my sorority then please give us a little respect.
Sure there are grades that I dread opening on Blackboard (looking at you Accounting 201) but not knowing is always worse than just seeing it and not knowing for months is dreadful. I am personally in a major where most of the professors are not required to do research, so I can only imagine what it’s like in those programs.
As finals week comes to a close, and there are still classes on Blackboard that have empty grade columns or have not been updated in months, please consider how much of our lives ride on what you give us, and remember that by not keeping us updated you did not give us the opportunity to improve, ask questions, or withdrawal from the class.
You don’t want grading to cut into your holiday break, and we don’t want the worrying to ruin ours so get to work because you have half a semesters worth to catch up on!
Sincerely,
All college students ever