With the new term and new year fresh in our minds, the last thing we want is for our optimism to be shattered by extended waiting periods and nerve-wracking test result stalls.
One of the greatest tools a student can have is a complete understanding of how they are doing in a course. When we know our grades and scores, we can make educated decisions on how much we need to study, if we can relax or even if we should drop a course because we’ve fallen into a hole we can’t dig ourselves out of.
So, when a professor fails to return grades in a timely fashion or doesn’t use Blackboard to keep us updated, not only are we in a constant state of anxiety, but we are put at an academic disadvantage. Because we don’t know how we are doing, we may grow frustrated, confused and unsure if we need to work harder to make improvements.
Any graduate teaching fellow or professor who consistently fails to get students their grades and test scores in a timely manner is committing an inexcusable violation of student rights. As long as we spend time studying on those late nights, sitting through their lectures and finishing up their projects, they should at least have the decency to return the favor and submit our scores and feedback via Blackboard or in person within a week after they’ve been turned in.
Most instructors are aware of this. Even though they are responsible for hundreds of students’ grades and research projects, they still manage to get us our grades soon enough to prevent that eye-raking where’s-my-grade-at period. They have a lot on their plates, but our faculty can typically get these things in on time.
That being said, there is simply no excuse for those who cannot give students their grades hastily. Many large classes have plenty of GTFs, and if a class is so large that it becomes an impossible feat for a team of instructors to get students their feeback within seven days after something has been turned in, then that class should be cut down in size anyway.
Professors, GTFs and the University all need to work together to ensure that students receive scores as soon as possible; it seems like every student can bring up a professor they’ve had who hasn’t given them their grades until it was too late for them to react to them.
Not only is it an academic issue, but, business-wise, it is a customer service issue. A university education is something that we are paying thousands of dollars to earn. This isn’t a public high school or some cheap investment, this is a university that will leave many of us and, in many cases our parents, in debt for years to come. We are paying huge sums of money, but we get ripped off every time a professor fails to get us our grades in a reasonable amount of time, or every time a GTF says he or she was “too busy” to get us our scores.
Our money and efforts have to be respected more. There is nothing more frustrating and disrespectful to paying customers than not giving them the service that they expect.
When professors ask us to be pinpoint accurate with due dates — piling on multiple projects at once to teach us time management skills, occasionally refusing to accept late work or even ranting about how essential punctuality is in the “real world” — well,  maybe it’s time for them to practice what they preach.
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