This fall, I passed from the undergraduate ranks at Oregon to the realm of graduate school at Colorado. And, although I cannot speak for tardy professors, I feel I can offer a counter opinion on late grades from graduate students.
The author of the editorial expresses irritation at “every time a GTF says he or she was ‘too busy’ to get us our scores.” The quotation marks around “too busy” seem to imply that graduate students really have all the time in the world and that their undergraduate students are their only responsibility. In addition to teaching, most graduate students take classes for at least their first year.
This year, I found myself juggling to finish grades while studying for, and maintaining, good grades in my own courses. Usually, as the author would appreciate, I try to get my students’ work back the next week. However, sometimes graduate students have midterms and homework too! One week, I had two midterms and, therefore, postponed my grading. Should I have failed my tests, in rather difficult classes I might add, for the sake of timeliness?
The author writes, “there is simply no excuse for those who cannot give students their grades hastily,” so maybe I do need to realign my priorities! The writer also states that “(students’) money and efforts have to be respected more.” But I have to wonder, does he or she respect the amount of effort required from graduate students? In my case, I have forty reports to grade a week, each of which usually takes at least ten to twenty minutes, depending on the report’s difficulty — and don’t get me started on students’ handwriting! I’ve spent entire weekends (not to mention most of Thanksgiving break) grading, often when I probably should have been focusing on a class, in order to input grades on time.
So dear author, I ask you to consider, for every tardy graduate student teacher, try to actually consider what we do indeed have on our plates. And for every timely grade submitted, appreciate the sizable amount of work we probably had to do to get it to you. Yes, punctuality is an important part of the real world, but so is realizing that everything won’t be handed to you the minute you want it, mistakes happen, and that things don’t always go as planned.
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