Favorite student emails

[Katrina Gulliver]

I guess the student underestimated their parent's overinvovlement in college...

LOL. Bet they regret signing that FERPA waiver now.

[RatGuy]

<snip>
My experience is that students who add a course late are much more likely to fail the course.

I seem to recall someone on the CHE Fora post data regarding late adds. The supporting evidence included non-curricular elements. In other words, students who have organizational, financial, and other concerns are usually the ones who add late to a course. Sometimes they're class shopping, but most often those other problems carry over into the registration process.

In Fall 2022 I had 10 students (from 4 sections) who added after the first week. One of them earned a B, another a D-, and the other 8 either withdrew or received an F for non-attendance. Small sample set, but I wonder if how close that "10% of late-adds pass the class" to everyone else's experience.

[apl68]

Got an email last night from my chair, starting with asking me if I was ok and if there was any help she could provide. I'm fine....I think. The email goes on with a complaint from a student's parent that I've been repeatedly cancelling class and there was no class all last week, along with concerns about how the university is going to handle this. The thing is...I haven't cancelled a class yet this semester. I wrote my chair back asking if perhaps the parent had mixed me up with a different instructor. Chair wrote me back that no, this seems to be a case of a student (presumably one living at home) telling a parent that the reason they weren't headed into class in the morning was because I kept cancelling class, and that she suspects someone is about to have a very unhappy parent. I guess the student underestimated their parent's overinvovlement in college...

Awfully shabby of that student to try to blame you for the student's own laziness.  I mean, really!--an ostensible adult lying like a child!

In this case the parent's helicoptering may turn out to be a good thing, if it leads that student to a memorable lesson regarding the consequences of lying.

[AmLitHist]

I've had more late-adds this spring than usual, all emailing me with a version of, "I'll turn in the things I missed." I go heavy on graded work in the first two weeks, and I have a no late work policy for a reason: just because you couldn't get your s&%t together and register on time doesn't give you a free pass, and if you're just today emailing me to tell me (not ask) that you'll catch up everything by Monday, doesn't work for me.  (Besides, in 20+ years of teaching, I've had exactly TWO late-enrolling students who've ever passed any of my classes, not because of my policies, but because they're similarly unable to get their acts together enough to actually do/pass the work.)

These are students who registered after the add drop period, or during it? I have to give special permission for anyone adding after the add drop period.

Same here--these were all during add/drop week.  Like you, I'd have to accept late adds beyond that week, and I refuse to do so.

Hmm, I tend to think that if students add during add drop week, they should have an opportunity to complete assignments they missed before they joined the class. Our add drop period is too long, In our case, it's 10 days after the start of classes, which is just silly. Does anybody really reasonably need more time than a few days, and two class periods? However, I'm not in charge of the schedule and if the school is telling students they can still change classes, they should be able to do so and not start off with zeros on assignments. The student can't be responsible for things on the syllabus when they weren't enrolled. Why not just set them a date of three dates to complete everything and be finished with it?

My experience is that students who add a course late are much more likely to fail the course. That said, correlation shouldn't be causation and I always try to give late-adding students a chance to make up the work. I think that it is wrong for an instructor to not allow students the chance to turn in work that they could not have done--or to put it another way, I think it is wrong for professors to penalize students for not turning in work they could not have turned in. I am pretty sure that

I agree with your rationale for accepting late work, JerseyJay and Caracal. However, it's college policy that we don't accept such late work, because over the years we too have found that late adds are unlikely to pass the class (and usually end up dropping pretty quickly--generally late enough, though, that they lose 20, 50, or 100% of their tuition in the process).  Also, across the district, our students traditionally have a history of being very late to register, which too many times has led to last minute scheduling headaches (closing sections for low enrollment, then having to open late-starts to meet the delayed demand, and such). I know that a lot of other CCs in this area have similar policies, for the same reasons.

[Caracal]

Got an email last night from my chair, starting with asking me if I was ok and if there was any help she could provide. I'm fine....I think. The email goes on with a complaint from a student's parent that I've been repeatedly cancelling class and there was no class all last week, along with concerns about how the university is going to handle this. The thing is...I haven't cancelled a class yet this semester. I wrote my chair back asking if perhaps the parent had mixed me up with a different instructor. Chair wrote me back that no, this seems to be a case of a student (presumably one living at home) telling a parent that the reason they weren't headed into class in the morning was because I kept cancelling class, and that she suspects someone is about to have a very unhappy parent. I guess the student underestimated their parent's overinvovlement in college...

Awfully shabby of that student to try to blame you for the student's own laziness.  I mean, really!--an ostensible adult lying like a child!

In this case the parent's helicoptering may turn out to be a good thing, if it leads that student to a memorable lesson regarding the consequences of lying.

It's kind of great to have the lie be so easily disproved. Usually when students are trying to blame me for their own failings, it's just self indulgent interpretations of what's happening.

[Caracal]

<snip>
My experience is that students who add a course late are much more likely to fail the course.

I seem to recall someone on the CHE Fora post data regarding late adds. The supporting evidence included non-curricular elements. In other words, students who have organizational, financial, and other concerns are usually the ones who add late to a course. Sometimes they're class shopping, but most often those other problems carry over into the registration process.

In Fall 2022 I had 10 students (from 4 sections) who added after the first week. One of them earned a B, another a D-, and the other 8 either withdrew or received an F for non-attendance. Small sample set, but I wonder if how close that "10% of late-adds pass the class" to everyone else's experience.

Ugh, which suggests that the reason schools extend add/drop so long is to get more registrations. Obviously, a better strategy would be to move up the deadline and provide more support for students who might be having issues, rather than putting students who are already at risk of flunking behind the 8 ball from the beginning in all their courses.

[jerseyjay]

In my experience there is definitely a direct correlation between late registration and poor performance. Sometimes it is causative--a student adds so late they cannot catch up in either the work or the material itself. Often it is because students who add late have other issues--too distracted, too unserious, etc., as RatGuy explained. Some students do of course do well in the class after adding it late, but that is not the rule.

My experience is also that the administration pressures faculty to accept these students, usually because if they do not enroll in classes late, they might not enroll at all, and hence hurt the school. I must assume that the administrators who push to allow students to be allowed to register late know that the odds are high they will fail, but feel this is outweighed the added enrollment.

Which is why I find it strange that AmLitHist's experience is that the administrators do not allow professors to accept late work. I would hope that the administrators there actively discourage late registration, since to encourage it but not allow them to pass would just be cynical.

One time, while I was teaching an aynchronous intro course at a community college, the college president called me on my cell phone and essentially begged me to take a section of the course that would start a month late to allow about a dozen (I think) students to take the course. I agreed, and out of the dozen students, not a single one passed the class. Most stopped doing work  early on, and nobody took the final exam. (I remember regularly emailing my chair and the president so that this result did not come as a surprise to them.) Since the students were not penalized in terms of turning in the work--they weren't actually late after all--this underlined that there were what RatGuy called "non-curricular" issues that meant that taking a bunch of students who could not register on time and placing them in a compressed online course was not a good idea.

[fosca]

It's not quite the same as late add, but I have at least a couple of students every semester who don't log in or do work during the first week of class and are then withdrawn, only to petition to be put back into the class.  We are "encouraged" (i.e. told) to let them back in, but I have yet to have one even finish the course, much less pass it.  And then their failing the class is a black mark against me.  It's basically a no-win situation, except for the student who gets to keep their financial aid for another semester.

[ciao_yall]

It's not quite the same as late add, but I have at least a couple of students every semester who don't log in or do work during the first week of class and are then withdrawn, only to petition to be put back into the class.  We are "encouraged" (i.e. told) to let them back in, but I have yet to have one even finish the course, much less pass it.  And then their failing the class is a black mark against me.  It's basically a no-win situation, except for the student who gets to keep their financial aid for another semester.

Does the school understand that if they allow too much financial aid fraud to slip past, they could be forced to pay it back?

[ciao_yall]

<snip>
My experience is that students who add a course late are much more likely to fail the course.

I seem to recall someone on the CHE Fora post data regarding late adds. The supporting evidence included non-curricular elements. In other words, students who have organizational, financial, and other concerns are usually the ones who add late to a course. Sometimes they're class shopping, but most often those other problems carry over into the registration process.

In Fall 2022 I had 10 students (from 4 sections) who added after the first week. One of them earned a B, another a D-, and the other 8 either withdrew or received an F for non-attendance. Small sample set, but I wonder if how close that "10% of late-adds pass the class" to everyone else's experience.

Ugh, which suggests that the reason schools extend add/drop so long is to get more registrations. Obviously, a better strategy would be to move up the deadline and provide more support for students who might be having issues, rather than putting students who are already at risk of flunking behind the 8 ball from the beginning in all their courses.

Exactly. In fact, we found at our college that registrations tended to drop off 2 weeks before the semester started. While the union pressured us to keep those classes open until the first day of classes (and beyond), all that did was screw up the students who had registered when the class was (inevitably) canceled and they had to scramble around for new ones.

[mythbuster]

We have the problem of late admission to the college entirely- so that we can "make quota". These students get registered usually the week before classes start in the Fall, and so all get put together in a few lab sections in Intro Bio that are magically created in that last week. Guess what the pass rate is for those lab sections as compared to the rest?

[jerseyjay]

The head of the general education program has explained the following problem here: there are some students who are failing a course by this time and cannot pass so the instructor advises them to withdraw from the course or they will fail. However, if they withdraw, they will loose their financial aid or have it reduced (because they are no longer taking a full load) and probably not come back to school. So their options are (a) to fail a class and continue to be a full-time student but have an F on their transcript or (b) withdraw from the class and not lower their GPA but loose financial aid. It is a no-win situation. It is not financial aid fraud if a student fails a class; it is only fraud if they take aid and do not attend the class. Many students manage to met the attendance and still fail a class.

(Of course, had the student studied in the first place some of this could have been avoided.)

[mythbuster]

I had an interesting discussion related to this this week. We are scrutinizing high DFW courses (which I often teach). Admins wanted to know how many of the failing students were "disengaged"- as in not turning anything in. The answer was almost zero based on who attempted the last 2 exams of the semester.

But how engaged can you be if you score a 35/100 on an exam? Either you are just randomly filling in bubbles on the scantron- which means you are faking being "engaged" or you are so clueless/lost that an intervention is needed- why are you in this course? But of course admin just wanted to know how many took the exams.

[fosca]

It's not quite the same as late add, but I have at least a couple of students every semester who don't log in or do work during the first week of class and are then withdrawn, only to petition to be put back into the class.  We are "encouraged" (i.e. told) to let them back in, but I have yet to have one even finish the course, much less pass it.  And then their failing the class is a black mark against me.  It's basically a no-win situation, except for the student who gets to keep their financial aid for another semester.

Does the school understand that if they allow too much financial aid fraud to slip past, they could be forced to pay it back?

I haven't the slightest idea.  I do know when we've brought up the possibility of dropping ghost students, we've been told no. 

[ergative]

An actual favorite! I can't quote too much of it, because it's more specific about my specialism than I'm comfortable sharing, but maybe you can get the gist from this redacted snippet:

Thank you for the great lectures! I can proudly declare that, as a [topic] student, you have had more impact on how I think about [fundamental component] than any of my [topic] lecturers. I ... often feel that attempts to [do research like what we discussed in class] are a foolish endeavour. Believing that "surely this is too complicated and nebulous for any numbers-minded [related-topic specialist] to claim mastery of". And yet! [lectures on related topic] have completely swayed my thinking! The [lecture] chart shall forever stay burned into my mind! [lecture] graphs clearly show [evidence of the complicated/nebulous thing]! I have been thinking about it a hell of a lot these past weeks, so thanks!

May the rest of the industrial action go brilliantly, and have a restorative reading week!