Join the "desparate e-mail" pool! Win virtual $

[sciprofmw]

So I will be submitting about 300 final grades today for an introductory science course.  Many students in this course have to have a "B" grade or higher to get into a professional program here on campus. This is a whiney grade-grubbing lot.  Knowing this, I *explicitly* told them when I took over the class the second 1/2 of the semester, that I would under no uncertain terms "bump them up".  I also indicated the specific decimal place I would round to.

Current breakdown going into the final is as follows:
7% A
34% B
38% C
14% D
7% F

Care to guess how many of these grade-grubbing desperate e-mail requests I will receive?   Pool is $5.00 virtual dollars per entry.  You can place only one entry.  This is my first (and last) time teaching this lot so your guess is good as mine, but I will refrain from placing an entry so everyone is on equal footing. 

Good luck - post bets over the next 24 hours and then I will count and post desperate e-mails through Friday night.  Winner will be announced on Sat.

Cheers!

[tt_finally]

82.

[atalanta]

Fun post!

I also teach a large class in which the students need to get a B+ or higher to qualify for a professional program. I think you will have to define exactly what you mean by a grade-grubbing e-mail. You will get messages that say ...

1. please please please bump up my grade
2. is there anything I can do to increase my grade?
3. I worked so hard, did so well, can't believe my low grade.. please check if it is correct.
4. how close was I to the cut-off? was I the highest B- (or C or whatever)?
5. this grade, all by itself, ruined my GPA and my life. It's so unfair bla bla BLA.

See, some of them are questions, some are complaints, but not all of them contain an explicit request for a grade change. So... do all of the above count as grade grubbing?

My guess: You will get a total of 30 inquiries, 10 of which contain explicit requests along the lines of 1 and 2.

Good luck! I can't wait to hear how it turns out.

[dept_geek]

42 responses. And 2 more in September, just because.

[ufo_tofu]

I'm in for 27 email responses.

Great post!

[sciprofmw]

Atlanta -  yes excellent point!  So let's not define them, since it may be hard to delineate and just say all e-mails where they cry about their grade whether it is an explicit request to change the grade or not, and then I will give a final breakdown of the category of the e-mails on sat.  Perhaps I will update that then a few months later.  A bit of an observational experiment.

You think I could publish this? ;-)

[discordia]

I'll go with 24

[odessa]

42 responses. And 2 more in September, just because.

Confound it, dept_geek beat me to the 42. 

Hmmm <tapping chin while doing mental calculations>  Let's see ... a quarter of the C's, plus a few of the D's and F's just because ... take that number and bump it a bit ...

38.

O.

[sciprofmw]

oops, I have a typo in the subject line and no way to fix it...

I just pressed the SUBMIT GRADES button!  Time to sit back and watch the fun :-)

[malvolio]

I'll go with 39.

Actually, I suspect it will be higher, but I'm being hopeful, just 'cause.

[dr_evil]

I've received this type of email before, but there were surprisingly few of them.  Hmmm...I'll say 14.  But MiniMe says 142.

[amiens]

Love this thread idea! 

I'll go with 31 (it's one of my roulette numbers).

[chemystery]

33.5

The half will either be completely unintelligible and you won't be entirely sure what it is the student wants, or it will be unsigned an unsigned note from a hotmail account and you want have a clue who the student is.  If you're really lucky, both.

[gennimom]

Um, I'll take 41.

[claragold]

 I'll take 32