I’ve been waiting for a cross-campus post like this for so long, and as soon as I get my grades I’m posting them right here!

i hope #2 is a joke

I have 4/6 now, which is better than last year when I only had 2/5 by Christmas. Last spring, none of my grades came in until the day before the deadline, and then they all came in within 24 hours of each other.

It’s not just professors. I have one who submitted our grades on December 15th, and the registrar still hasn’t posted them online.

What is the exact deadline that professors have until?

Yea, I still have none of my grades up though some classes were small and most of the stuff was graded, before finals week. Maybe there is some delay?

I don’t care about the grades so much, I just want my schedule worksheet for spring semester!

ask about that.

If you want the University to crack down on the profs/registrar, ask that spring tuition should be due on the day your last fall grade is posted.

this is taking longer than ever before!

Maybe some faculty delay submitting grades until after the holiday break because they do not what their own break spoiled by the usual raft of complaints from furious A-minus students (C students never complain). In my experience the whining emails start arriving in my inbox about 20 minutes after I hit the “grade submit” button.

I teach at another institution, where all grades are due the Tuesday following the exam week. It can be done, though it is a scramble if you have a late exam… I am very sympathetic, however, to the concern raised by #20. It is irritating to get a flurry of objections, proclamations of disappointment, entreaties for a second reading, etc., as soon as the grades are posted. And, yes, it is always the A-’s and B+’s who feel they are entitled to object before even seeing their exams.

@17, 21, 23: nobody cares but you.

@embittered faculty members: I love you.

I second the plea for Schedule Worksheets. Grades can wait. I want to plan my NEW classes.

Even realizing that professors have until January 4th to submit grades, I find it hard to wait until then for grades in classes that were over by the end of November.

I sound like an entitled d-bag, but having spent the last few weeks of the semester studying, writing out essays, showing work for critique, and taking exams, I think it makes perfect sense to want some sort of response, especially in the cases where nearly a month has passed.

And faculty members, if you don’t want your vacations ruined by a flurry of emails from angry students, that hardly requires that you delay your submission of grades. Instead, don’t check your Yale email, and enjoy your break.

You’re a huge suck-up, you know that?

Not only do I doubt that faculty members actually post here, but if they do… all the more reason for us to be annoyed. Stop trolling the undergraduate newspaper and grade our bloody finals.

1/5

Professors grade? I just thought the TAs did all the dirty work and then send the final, polished result to the professor? Maybe that’s just the freshman experience…

I am glad someone is at least talking about the delay in receiving the grades… It is December 29th and I have received 0/5 grades. I just think that when we get so stressed out to hand in everything on time the Professors should try and give back the grades as soon as possible. #31, I want to get impatient I was done with some of my classes 2-3 weeks ago and still I haven’t received anything…

33: Well we wouldn’t want teaching to get in the way of your research, would we? What a hack.

I don’t think “teaching” includes dealing with OCD students who want a 10 page explanation about why they got an A- instead of an A.

Professors need to relax. Is it actually too much to ask you to grade something in a week’s time? If you are actually doing the grading, then it’s a small class and you actually don’t have a lot of things to grade. All written work is supposed to be due by the end of Reading Week so it is unacceptable that we’re 3 weeks out of Reading Week and still nothing.

If you’re a lecturer, then TAs do all the grading anyways so you have very little to actually do. Have them get on their business.

yeah seriously #33 if you’re actually a professor, that’s sad. you don’t want us emailing you over break? then don’t work at a university teaching students. i hope you’re not a real yale professor. what a joke.

Do you send out A’s first and non A’s much later to have peaceful holidays?

Dear students, there is no single answer to why your grades take time. Sometimes the TAs have a lot to grade. Sometimes we profs have a lot to grade (in spite of the myth that we don’t do it). Sometimes we have other things on our plate such as research, illness, family obligations and vacations, often work-filled vacations. Add to that how late some of your papers and projects come in, and one or two difficult cases needing intervention or a second opinion or a chat with your dean, and the whole class has to wait. No professor or TA I know takes grading lightly. In fact most of us spend more time on grading than we are paid for. We are hired for research, and most of us give many more hours to Yale College teaching than we are paid for. If you want teaching to come first, Yale’s not the place to find it. You have to choose between teachers at the cutting edge and teachers who have all day to talk with you. Professors cannot do both at once.

I believe that most of us and the registrar will meet the grade submission and release deadline. It was not Christmas Eve.

I am only too happy to reconsider your grades. Please explain where I went wrong when you e-mail me. Explaining how your extracurricular activities kept your from studying or hinting at litigation is not persuasive though both options do provide for interesting reflections when writing recommendation letters.

Some of us were still grading on Christmas eve. It wouldn’t surprise me if some are still grading on New Years eve as well. Some of us grade in airport lounges, on planes and on trains. Sometimes we have to delay grading until we can get back to the library to check on plagiarism and strange or bad references. Sorry that it takes so long but that’s how it is sometimes, and believe me when I say we’re not having any fun with it. Lots of us love teaching here but I haven’t met anyone who loves grading, especially the half-assed papers that some people write in one or two days when it should have taken three weeks. It is disappointing when you get that from an intelligent student who kept asking for meetings to discuss good possible topics but then didn’t do any real work on them.

Probably we could set the deadlines for final papers a couple of weeks earlier so they can be graded before exam grading and vacation. Would students actually start work on them in the second or third week of term?

That’s sooo nice of you, apologizing for all of us.
We all know that irrational complaining can be annoying; however, we are students of this university and we have every right to complain when we feel that we received an unfair grade. Also, mind that whoever complains thinks that has the right on his side.
One last thing, all these who need to send the grades to Internships and jobs do suffer.
SY’ 10: TALK ABOUT YOURSELF!

i’m sure the admissions office and the prospective class of 2014 would love to see your comment.

this thread is so ending up on ivygate.

I understand that professors, TAs, and graders are working on a deadline, and I appreciate that it will be in by then, but some of #51′s comments do bother me.

#50 thinks that the previous comment:
“We are hired for research, and most of us give many more hours to Yale College teaching than we are paid for. If you want teaching to come first, Yale’s not the place to find it. You have to choose between teachers at the cutting edge and teachers who have all day to talk with you. Professors cannot do both at once.” would bother the admissions office and incoming 2014-ers. This makes sense. While I understand that Professors are very busy, we were told during the admissions process that Yale places emphasis on TEACHING. A lot of us chose Yale amongst liberal arts colleges and over other research institutions for this focus. We thought that we could get the best of both worlds.

Also, not getting our grades until the fourth does hurt some students. I will not claim that it hurts most, because it doesn’t. But there are several internships with deadlines before the fourth. Some companies have a minimum screening cutoff. As a freshmen, I have no GPA to disclose. An upperclassmen may not be able to average in higher grades.

To reiterate, I too am a student eagerly awaiting for my grades, but I understand that Professors have every right to their holidays. There were just a couple of comments that I wanted to express my opinions on.

I believe that the discussion about student grade complaints is irrelevant to this article. It is neither caused or solved by early/late grade releases. Students, be reasonable- excuses are excuses. Professors, don’t check your emails over break.

Yes, please do inform the Admissions Office and prospective students. It may help the admissions office to improve their admissions procedures so fewer Yale places are wasted on students who do not want to learn, and it may help potential students to work out whether they want a Yale education or only easy grades.

Really, if you already know so much more than your professors, why waste time studying here? Just go and solve the problems of the Middle East and North Korea! Or go direct to medical school! Hell, why waste time in medical school – just walk into the Yale New Haven hospital and start surgery tomorrow!

Students wait until 11:59:59 on the day of any given deadline to submit their finals, when they’ve had reading week and finals period to do nothing but their work. Yet they demand different of professors, who’ve had the Christmas and New Year’s period to grade, both of which come with family and travel obligations. Why the double standard?

#53 wonders how it can be possible that teaching doesn’t come first for Yale professors. Well, you just plain can’t get hired if your emphasis is teaching. Those wonderful teachers you’ve had? They were hired for their research. Those horrible teachers you’ve had? They were hired for their research. It’s a truism for scientists, but is also the case in the humanities. A junior professor who wastes time refining his teaching runs a serious risk of never being promoted. All academics know this. Most of us have serious reservations about that fact.

OMGGGGG!!!!

LiKe WhErE ArE mY GGGGRAAAADEEESSS?!?@!??!?!!?@@

If I don’t like, seriously, get all A’s in all 5 of my courses, I’m seriously going to let the Yale Administration have it, BIG TIME!@!!!1

I think the more important question that people are passing over by feuding with professors is, to paraphrase the four questions, why is this year different from all other years? I’m just a sophomore but in my first two semesters at Yale I don’t remember having to wait nearly this long for grades. Maybe I just had profs that were more on top of their game, but this thread doesn’t seem to be a semi-annual ritual. Am I wrong, did I get good profs my first two semesters, or did something out of the ordinary happen this semester?

And for what it’s worth, I still only have two of five grades.

I interned at Yale over the summer, and recently I went back to talk to my supervisor and coworkers. They said that while previously Yale had only given Christmas Eve/Day and New Year’s Eve/Day as mandatory holidays, this year they had rearranged the schedule so from Christmas Eve through January 3rd was mandatory vacation (they had compensated for this by dropping other days off from the calendar). They didn’t say if this was university-wide, but it would seem likely, and that would explain why grades came in earlier in previous years (when not everyone was on vacation between Christmas and New Years) than this year.

Want to know the professor’s side?

http://www.yaleprof.blogspot.com

I know it’s annoying that everybody is complaining but it is also annoying when you get an email from a prospective summer employer (D.E. Shaw) asking why you don’t have your complete self-reported grades (in a “did you fail a course?” sort of tone – got this 30 minutes ago). Several deadlines are early in January and I am waiting on 3/4 of my grades (2 of which are for (math) classes with less than 20 students and no papers).
I have a friend who could not apply to an internship because he missed the GPA cutoff by .03 (min 3.5 GPA), I know he would love to have his last grade as he got 3 A’s in his other classes. Sadly, for him, 3 of the internships he wanted to apply to already closed their apps. If you want to call him a whinnny student too then you are a pretty narrow-minded professor (that being said however you are right in 95% of the cases that students are just whinny and want their resume to read “GPA: 3.93″ instead of 3.90).

the answer to most questions above is: the economy. hooray.

but seriously, a class schedule worksheet would be sweet.

well. now it’s after 5 pm on the 4th of january and i still don’t have 2 of my grades.

one of which is from the largest class this term, econ 115…which means that almost 500 people also don’t have all of their grades too.

Ok some students are being silly here, however the deadline is passed and the grades are still not all up (now complaining students have a point, however, after all most all of you are not exactly happy when we hand in a paper 1 day after the deadline). Btw professors get a lot of spare time (think summer, no travel, no long nights, no working over Christmas to complete an evaluation of an IPO). I would love to see one of you professors complain to a regular mimimum wage employee who gets 10 days of holidays a year (“buhu I wasted 1.5 of my 10 weeks of annual holidays grading, poor me and all the students are soooo mean – they only have to study for the LSAT, MCAT and GRE over the winter and apply to internships”). Sorry, I know some students were whining here, but you select few profs are equally bad.

Okay, now it’s past the deadline. If this were an essay, I’d probably get marked down significantly. Give us our grades. Seriously.

They got rid of the gpa’s from the web transcripts so that one couldn’t back-calcualate a class grade before submitting a course evaluation. (They weren’t starred out like the course grades.)

So it’s well past the deadline and I still have not received 3/4 of my grades… I would usually be more patient, but I am in the midst of applying to programs (with deadlines in about a week) that require transcripts, GPAs, etc. from last semester…

I have now submitted two incomplete internship applications because I am still missing 2/5 grades almost 24 hours after the deadline. I don’t know where the problem is but if it’s with the professors, stop being lazy and get your work in (after all, we had to) and if it’s a problem with the registrar, shame on you. You are making your students look bad because you can’t finish your work

only have 2 out of 4 and its past the deadline…

A fair grade is the true measure of learning. Yale Professors are capable to give fair assessment and should not be annoyed by students’ inquiry. To have students complete the teacher evaluation before receiving their grades is an insult to the professors.

I’m still missing 2/4 grades… I didn’t bother complaining to professors before the deadline, that would just be hypocritical. However, it would be nice to have them now. I emailed the professors just to see when they’d be coming in, and one of the professors got back to me and explained that he has TAs from all over the world emailing him the final exam grades… To be honest, it was just nice getting some type of response from the professors, even if it wasn’t my actual grade back…

I also support pass-fail grading. But I also believe in raising the standards for a pass. People complain that it is too easy to get an A here, but the ease of getting a C or D is more serious.

I like it when students contest their grades with good justification. It suggests good things about the student’s attention to detail and approach to solving problems. Contesting a grade with poor justification demonstrates the opposite.

The registrar makes it difficult to change grades. One reason is to prevent professors with poor reviews from exacting revenge on the class. This works in conjunction with requiring student surveys before grades are released.

I’m growing a bit concerned. I got an e-mail from a professor sent to the entire class late yesterday that he had submitted grades to the registrar, but as of now they have not been posted. To me, this suggests a potentially large delay at the registrar’s office…

And I’m stunned that you think your grading is so infallible that students shouldn’t have a chance to point out potential errors. No grading system should ever be implemented without some safeguards, and let’s face it, students are more likely to catch errors that negatively affect a grade than professors are–we’re concerned with one grade, you’re concerned with many more.

Re: #85/94: I think most if not all faculty are open to correcting error. Most of us will gladly check the calculations, recording, and clerical aspects of a grade. Indeed, grades can easily be changed by a simple certification and evidence that a clerical error was involved. Grade changes for other reasons must be granted by the Comm. on Honors and Academic Standing. The problem cases that are so depressing and annoying involve students who have an inflated concept of the quality of their work or themselves and argue that anything they do is worth an A. I have had students argue that I should change grades 1) so they will not be disappointed, or 2) to not “marr” their otherwise “perfect” transcript. … Really!

(I’m not #94, though I agree with him/her)

#85, I’m disappointed by your arrogance! You’re either asserting that your grading system is infallible or that correcting grade errors is not worth your effort. The former presumes perfection not only in your own calculations but also in the recording done by the registrar’s office (unless it is recorded online directly, as anonny, #93, indicates). If the latter is true, then I’ll simply say: I hope I never have you as a professor…

Yale College does not “forbid” changing grades. It allows grade changes for clerical errors; other changes are more difficult, but possible with the approval of the Committe on Honors and Academic Standing.

If you’re still “stunned at students who think it is their right to contest their grades,” perhaps you never read this excerpt from Yale’s Instructors’ Handbook:

“Students may from time to time approach you to question or even dispute a score or grade they received in your course. It has long been the norm at Yale for instructors to be responsive to such questions, provided, of course, that the student’s request is civil and reasonable.”

Also, to address the issue at hand (waiting for grades), I’d like to remind everyone that the “deadline” was for PROFESSORS to submit grades. If the registrar’s office has to do recording by hand (I’m still unclear about this point), then the grades can’t possibly be available at the “deadline” if a professor submits them only seconds before. And, just as we can turn in papers just before they’re due, professors really should have until the deadline.

I have a friend who teaches in humanities and says that if he gives a B+ or worse, he has to prepare to have long arguments with the student in question. The question is not whether grades are infallible — of course not. The question is whether this is just a negotiation process, and the professor has to decide whether to fight to maintain grading standards, or cave in so he/she can teach the next course…

Okay every time a person brings up grading in a humanities class I cringe. That is not what this discussion is about. We all know the grading on papers and other writing is subjective. The relevant point here is that in classes with no curve and numerical inputs it is easy for a student to calculate the grade that they actually deserved (not speculate on what they thought they deserved on a final paper). As such, the policy exists to allow changes that rectify any miscalculations or clerical errors, not so that humanities majors can negotiate their grade. If humanities professors choose to be soft and let students decide their grades, that is their problem. I can’t imagine that saying, “under no circumstances will I reevaluate the subjective measure I’ve already given you” involves a long argument. The conversation can stop there

Your friend should talk to Prof. Darden. I’ve taken a few of his classes, and he gives a full range of grades (A-F); he must have either an inexhaustible reserve of patience or a system to deal with such complaints.

Lol….. took a while. But late is better than never I guess.