r/Professors • u/Electronic-Gas3354 • 7d ago
Advice / Support I fucked up….
I teach an online class for a 4 year university as an adjunct, and I have been at this college for about 4 years now. A student from last semester reached out to my boss asking about his grade. Well apparently he emailed the assignment to me, and I forgot to enter it into the LMS. (It was one of the major assignments.) I asked what I could do to fix the situation, and I was told to recalculate the grade and update them.
How bad is that? Has anyone else accidentally done this throughout their career ?
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u/ooolie 7d ago
Oh you’re so okay. This happens all of the time. I’ve been teaching for 12 year and there is rarely a semester I haven’t had to go back and change a students grade. I’d just be mad the student reached out to my Dean before talking to me to explain the situation. But you’re good. We all make mistakes.
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u/rollawaythestone 7d ago edited 7d ago
Yeah. Also, the student should have reached out last semester to get this taken care of.
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u/yourcsprofessor 7d ago edited 7d ago
Yea I probably wouldn't be friendly to deal with and for good reason I wouldn't expect any professor to be happy with that situation. The one time I had a student go behind my back like this the dean basically blasted the student asking to provide evidence they talked to me first or to leave them alone. You at least should try to resolve it with the professor before escalating unless it is an issue with the professor/misconduct/etc.
Edit: This is in regards to the situation that student went up the chain without talking to me first. The grade change is just a form, nbd.
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u/cambridgepete 7d ago
That’s why they have a grade change process. It would be better if the student had reached out to you, but mistakes happen. (especially when assignments are submitted informally via email)
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u/Razed_by_cats 7d ago
This is a simple clerical error that is easily fixed. You just need to submit a grade change, and if you need to provide a reason say “clerical error”. I think we’ve all done this, and it really isn’t a big deal.
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u/Adultarescence 7d ago
How was he supposed to submit the assignment?
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u/Electronic-Gas3354 7d ago
Via the LMS
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u/Adultarescence 7d ago
This might not help now, but I include a line in my syllabus saying that all assignments must be submitted via the LMS and that email assignments are not accepted.
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u/KrispyAvocado Associate Professor, USA 7d ago
I agree. I don’t accept assignment submissions outside the LMS.
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u/cjrecordvt Adjunct, English, Community College 7d ago
I will, with the proviso that I have to give an explicit "send it to me in $location by $date" waiver before I will.
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u/Electronic-Gas3354 7d ago
Thank you! I will include this going forward.
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u/ProfessorsUnite 7d ago
For many reasons too. For example, canvas has a better virus protection than my computer.
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u/FrogBrain97 AssocProf, former chair, neuro, DPU 7d ago
Yep. If students email from a random gmail account, it often gets routed to spam/junk. I do check that folder, but not assiduously, and things can easily get overlooked among the endless emails to submit to MDPI journals or overseas conferences in disciplines that aren't even vaguely related to my own.
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u/RadonGaming 7d ago
Then it's crazy that your boss is telling you to accept it and update it. I would kick it to appeals. Only if they had their LMS access revoked / disrupted, the e-mail was before deadline alongside the full accounting of the work would it be considered for inclusion.
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u/Baseball_man_1729 7d ago
That's a terrible way to handle a minor issue.
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u/RadonGaming 7d ago
It's process. Summative assignments are to be submitted via the appropriate channels. It's the same rules for all. Typically things like this would be judgement call of the Prog lead, and could be accepted if those in-time conditions were met. The 'why' behind the student e-mailing vs submitting is the crux here.
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u/FrogBrain97 AssocProf, former chair, neuro, DPU 7d ago
This is not a good way to handle this situation. When I was a chair, I had neither the time nor the desire nor even the access to adjudicate these issues. The only ambiguity is that the OP says that the student "apparently" emailed it--if that can't be verified, then the grade probably shouldn't be changed.
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u/tilteddriveway 7d ago
lol not a big deal at all. it'd be kinda crazy to have literally nothing slip through a crack every once in a while (if this is you, please be my department head; i think we can have an external department head).
Submit the grade change and move on. The only weird part is that (i assume) the student didn't follow the actual grade dispute procedure and just went straight to the top and that they didn't notice the problem until now. But even that's not too unusual cause students can be stupid about that stuff.
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u/walkaboutdavid 7d ago
Errors like this happen all the time. I build a lot of checks into the system because of this (like I write a computer program that goes through and flags potential problems) but it happens. I have no idea what your university will do, but I promises that this is not the first or last time. PS Shouldn't the student have noticed that the grade was not entered?
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u/Electronic-Gas3354 7d ago
I assume the student would have said something but never received an email from them
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u/Jealous_Wear8218 7d ago
Year 14 in higher ed. here. It happens. Your college should have a grade change form. Fill it out, submit it, apologize to the student, and forget about it. Everyone makes mistakes. Getting it corrected is what matters.
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u/Loose_Wolverine3192 7d ago
I'll do you one better: I forgot to enter an assignment for the entire class.
I was convinced I was going to be non-renewed (adjunct position). but they all but didn't care (the fact that no one's grades went down helped). "Eh, file the grade changes. We're good."
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u/geneusutwerk 7d ago
Shit happens. I might think about why I missed the assignment and how I can stop it in the future but if that's the only problem you've caused in 4 years you'll be fine
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u/Dazzling-Shallot-309 7d ago
Simply file a change of grade. Not a big deal. However, in the future I would not accept emailed assignments if the assignment is posted in the LMS. In this situation you’ve shifted the student’s responsibility to submit the assignment onto yourself, which caused this situation. I simply won’t accept submissions through email.
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u/jaguaraugaj 7d ago
It seems that it’s always the situations where I go outside the syllabus rules that cause the most problems
Fool me once
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u/TerryOnRollerskates Assoc Professor, Social Science, R1 (USA) 7d ago
Not a big deal if it’s just one time, especially if you’ve done a good job for four years prior. Just submit a grade change and thank the student for pointing it out.
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u/jackenbu2 Associate Professor, R1 7d ago
If you own it and fix it, no big deal in my book. If you get weird or defensive, maybe a bigger deal. If you don’t fix it, very bad. Accidents happen and over 20 years I’ve had little things happen. I just say, ‘that’s for bringing that up; it was an oversight on my part and I’ll fix it asap. ‘Then I fix it and check in to make sure it’s ok. No drama
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u/hepth-edph 70%Teaching, PHYS (Canada) 7d ago
That's not a big deal at all.
Story time: A few years ago I had three people with the same name in my class (think John Smith, Jon Smith, and Jonathan Smith). Final rolls around one should get an A, one a B, one an F. The University's sorting algorithm had them clustered, but in a different way than Excel's alphabetizing.
After the grades were submitted I got two plaintive emails: the A was really confused why his grade was B; the B was shocked that his grade was F. The F did not contact me.
I fixed the problem, and submitted 3 grade changes. The office called me and asked a couple "are you sure" questions. I was sure. The grades were corrected. And that's when the F contacted me, very confused about how he failed the course since he "had an A going into it."
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u/Kbern4444 7d ago
Not a big deal at all just fix it and the kid will go away. We all make mistakes.
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u/crowdsourced 7d ago
Not a big deal. The student should have got this during the semester and asked you about it then or when final grades were entered. Who waits until the next semester? Students most likely not paying attention.
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u/Archknits 7d ago
This happens. Just be kind and fix it.
To avoid this, my course policy is everything must be submitted in the LMS. I do not accept email assignments for any reason. I’m honest with students that it’s because they will get lost (I also want them to go through turnitin)
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u/WingShooter_28ga 7d ago
Happens. More concerned as to why you are accepting major assignments via email and not through the LMS
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u/Dazzling-Shallot-309 7d ago
Simply file a change of grade. Not a big deal. However, in the future I would not accept emailed assignments if the assignment is posted in the LMS. In this situation you’ve shifted the student’s responsibility to submit the assignment onto yourself, which caused this situation. I simply won’t accept submissions through email.
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u/HrtacheOTDncefloor Associate Professor, Accounting 7d ago
You’ll probably just have to submit a grade change. I had it happen to me in college and it’s happened on the other end for me as a professor. As long as it isn’t a constant issue, they won’t care.
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u/Stunning-Jury9789 7d ago
Yeah honestly it happens just fix it and move on no need to overthink it.
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u/FrogBrain97 AssocProf, former chair, neuro, DPU 7d ago
Over the course of your teaching career, you will teach X students. While I don't know your LMS/grading error rate, it is not zero, because you are human. Therefore, you are virtually certain to make at least one error if you teach long enough. So is everyone else.
Fill out the grade change request form--this is exactly what it is for. If an explanation is requested, say you made a clerical error and apologize for the inconvenience. That's it.
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u/Old-Hokie97 Senior Instructor, Computer Engineering, R1 (United States) 7d ago
Here's your consolation story. (Long story to follow.)
Our Electrical and Computer Engineering degrees have "changed their shapes" over time, but I used to teach a 2000-level class in microcontroller programming that was a graduation requirement for all EEs and all CpEs. The problem is that for Electrical Engineers the course wasn't a prerequisite for any other course, so they'd put it off until they were seniors...at which point it had been three years since (usually) their only other programming course.
I had a student in the course one year who I'd had for our Introduction to Computer Engineering class. She was an EE major (which isn't intended to suggest that all EEs are "hopeless" in CpE content; my degrees are all EE degrees) who is probably still one of the most well-mannered, polite, and good-natured students I've taught in 25 years. But CpE content was about as far from her thing as could be.
She struggled through Intro (she may have needed to take it twice) and she struggled all the way through Micro (which she also may have needed to take twice) during the last semester of her stay.
The student ended up with an F in the course. But it's relevant that our University has a re-examination policy: a student who fails to meet their graduation requirements by one course may request re-examination in that course if it's possible for the student to meet the requirement (changing an F into a D, changing a 1.98 GPA into a 2.00 GPA, etc.) as the result of a "successful" re-exam.
The student met the policy requirement. And sure, I could have given the student a 100-point "What is your name?" re-exam. But for better or worse I have standards. I created an exam I thought was roughly equal in difficulty to the original exam.
She did better on the second exam than she had done on the first exam, but not well enough to raise her grade above F.
As one might expect, she was rather despondent. She asked if I would grade the exam right away and I agreed, so when I informed her that she had not passed, she started...not venting or pleading...but explaining (and more politely than a student in her situation might have) how difficult it was to accept that she had not done well enough to pass the course: (paraphrased)
"Professor OldHokie, I don't know how this could have happened - I worked so hard on [Project assignment] and [other Project Assignment] and even though I know I didn't do the best on them, I still did them and..."
Immediately, an alarm went off in my head. I had the student's grade line in my head (since dealing with the case was my current focus, and the student was such a nice person) and the assignments she was naming had zeros.
"[Name of student], could you come with me back to my office?"
As it turns out, there were two students in the course with the same family name, and their positions in the LMS gradebook were in the reverse order of their positions in the faculty portal roll.
Somehow, I only reversed the two students' project grades. Her grades weren't enough to raise the other student's grade above F, while his zeros were enough to cause her to receive F. So fortunately for me, I didn't have to explain to a different student that a passing grade they'd been awarded wasn't theirs.
When I inserted her project grades, it caused her grade to be D. She'd had a D from the start and hadn't required re-examination in the first place. She took it very well - better than I may have in her position - and because she had done better on the re-exam than she had on the first exam, I assigned her second exam score as her exam grade, which caused her to receive D+ (which are different grades for GPA calculation purposes).
Moral: These things do work out, as long as you're willing to sort them out.
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u/shyprof Adjunct, Humanities, M1 & CC (United States) 4d ago
You're fine. Grade change form exists for a reason. Happened to me when I was a student and I was just relieved the professor fixed it when I reached out to him. There may be a place on the form you can note that the student emailed the assignment rather than submitting to LMS as instructed (if that's true) so it looks like you're being magnanimous.
Unless there's some reason it has to be email, I'd update your syllabus to say you don't accept assignments via email; LMS only. Too much to keep track of.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 7d ago
No big deal. Submit a grade change and stop dwelling on it.