End of term blues

Another semester here at the university is finally coming to an end. There's the usual rush to grade papers, projects and exams and to compute grades. If one has advisees, then there are also the last minute consultations with advisees and frantic readings of manuscripts. It's pretty stressful as a result and that's the main reason I hate this time of the academic year even if I look forward to a break from teaching.

One of the more frustrating things about this time of the year are the really stupid students who show up at your office expecting miracles.

First there are those advisees working on their final projects who don't show their faces at all during the entire semester only to show up during the last few days of classes. I had this girl who was hoping to graduate this semester do just that on the very last day of classes (two Fridays ago)--and at four o'clock in the afternoon! Of course, I was very busy already by then with grading the third long exams and computing pre-final standings of my students in my various lecture classes whose final exams were scheduled the following week. Lucky for her though I decided I had a quarter of an hour to spare to look at her project. But she had to endure the scolding I gave her for showing up less than two weeks before the deadline for submitting grades of graduating students. I also told her flat out that I didn't think she'd be able to graduate this semester since based on experience, it takes at least a month on the average to iron out all the wrinkles in a project. She cringed at that. Anyway, when she did show me her project, it was just as bad as I expected: it was still full of bugs and needed a lot of revisions. Then it got worse: she admitted that instead of working on her final project during the semester, she went abroad to visit friends! I was so angry I couldn't say anything. And then it got even worse: she had not begun writing her manuscript either. And she expects to finish everything in less than two weeks?! Give me a break! To make a long story short, she's seen me just once since and her project still has some errors. And, FYI, today was the last day for submitting grades of graduating students.

Another common occurrence during these last days of the semester are students who come to check on their final grades and are shocked to see that they have failed the course. More often than not, they come to see me primarily to beg that they be given some other requirement to work on to boost their grades. Naturally, I can't allow that as that would be unfair to the rest of my students. Sometimes when I double check the computation of their grades to assure them that they have indeed failed, I discover that the main cause is that they have missed many quizzes. When I inquire about the reason, it's often because they have not been attending the lecture classes or else come to class late s(I nearly always give a quiz at the beginning of the class period) because they had overslept. And these guys expect to pass while missing quizzes?

In other cases, the student has been consistently doing very poorly in the long exams which often means that they need to get a high score in the final exam in order to pass the course. The student thinks he/she can afford to do poorly in the long exams and just make up for it in the final exam. What surprises me is that they are usually very confident that they will get that high score when history/statistics indicate otherwise. Take for instance, one student of mine whose average rating in the long exams was a dismal 45%. He needed 75% in the final exam to earn at least a conditional failing grade (giving him a chance to take and pass a removal exam instead of failing the course outright). He was very shocked when he found out that he got "only" 62%. Then of course, this was followed by the requisite pleas for consideration. Oh well.

And so there. The sad thing is, I constantly get this thing year in year out. Students apparently never learn and never change--and I thought that there was this wonderful thing called evolution.