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Show page 14 lessons, Fail 2003 Paying the Price of Late Grades BY STEPHANIE RICHARDSON the sun turns into a red giant the earth is burnt to a V V crisp, turning in your grades on time will not matter. Nor will the grades themselves, nor will lots of things. Right now, however, late grades are a substantial problem for both good and poor students. How many grades are turned in to the Registrar's office after the deadline of the first Tuesday after the last day of finals? According to Sharon Aiken-W i s n i e w s k i, Associate Dean of University College, in Fall, 2001, over 85,000 grades were late. Eighty-five thousand! Every semester, sixteen departments (and you know who you are) consistently report over two thousand grades after the deadline, and five departments consistently report between three and five thousand grades late. Late grades are certainly not unique to our University; every campus struggles with this problem. However, the magnitude of the problem (85,000!) and the norm of large numbers of late grades from some departments are difficult for me to understand, and impossible to justify to the student. Life isn't fair, but the classroom should be, and if we require timely assignments from the students, they have a right to expect timely grade recording from us. And here's why: You might think that John Student getting a C grade in your course would be glad of the delay and in fact, would hope that the grade would never, ever be recorded. But if John is receiving other grades of C and C- that semester and your grade is late, his GPA will be below a 2.0, resulting in an academic warning. A hold is placed on his registration and John will need to attend an Academic Success Workshop in order for the hold to be released. Not a bad intervention, perhaps, but a time-waster if it was unwarranted. If John were already on warning, he'll be |
