Well, it was bound to happen. After working in education for more than twelve years I finally had my first student formally ask for a grade appeal from administration. Granted, it’s not my full-time gig, but instead one of the places where I adjunct at. I’m anxious to see how administration will handle the situation considering the deadline to submit an appeal has already passed to begin with. Anyhow, a quick run down of the situation….

This class has a lot of writing involved and students are expected to use APA format. In fact, students should already know how to use it and have passed classes in the past writing papers at this college. Most of the students in this class are getting ready to graduate as it is a JR-SR level class so I would expect decent work. This past semester, that expectation was not met. In fact, it was so bad, I had to seek assistance from my program contact, the librarian and the student services (read as tutoring service) to assist in the various issues going on as in many cases it would be considered an academic integrity issue.

Examples of this include:

  • Improperly formatted citation(s) within a document
  • Improper in-text citation
  • Partial paraphrase, makes an attempt but lacks understanding

Now, after the initial issues, if it happened again, it moves from a minor infraction to a standard infraction which comes with an automatic failure for the course. So, how do you think I handled it to begin with? Nicely, I would think. Instead of reporting, I chose to allow students to work with tutoring, librarians, etc. They were then informed if they did it again, they would receive zeroes on their papers. Any guesses what happened? Yep, you’ve got it right. Same issues repeated, paper received a zero, student complains.

So, here we go on the roller coaster. So far, the division chair has sent an email with an initial look at the situation. However, the details were not looked at. (I always leave comments as to why zeroes are given, these weren’t seen nor referenced…) Tomorrow will be a phone call with my program coordinator so we shall see. My hope is that administration will back up even the lowly adjunct as the student did not earn a different grade.