Notes from the Desk Waiting on grades Why does it take Middlebury so long to deliver?

Author: Zamir Ahmed

I really enjoyed my parents' questions to me over Winter Break. What do you eat for lunch? Burgers and fries at Proctor on Friday. How often do you go to the gym? Not often enough. What were your grades for the fall semester? [Long pause] Good?

After enduring long hours of studying, carpal tunnel syndrome from typing papers and staving off hunger pains while waiting in line for Midnight Breakfast during finals week, what do I have to show for it? Nothing. No grades. No professor feedback. Nothing.

It's been three weeks since the last day of finals and we still have not received our grades for the fall semester. Are you telling me it takes professors that long to grade papers and exams, submit grades to the registrar and post them online?

I understand that professors have lives outside of the classroom - although last semester professors seemed to have forgotten that students do too, judging by how much work they gave us. However, that should not mean it takes longer to get your grades back than your tax return.

Don't get me wrong. I think that grades sometimes get in the way of learning. We may write papers about things we know about already, instead of taking on new and different issues that take us out of our comfort zone and challenge us, just so that we'll get a good grade. We may study just so that we can regurgitate information on exams rather than trying to form our own opinions on things or learning facts and ideas so that we remember them forever, not just until after a test is over.

I don't care about grade that much. However, graduate schools and companies do. As do parents - and they pay the bills. Getting my grades earlier would give me a chance to beg my professors to change them before my parents saw them. Knowing that this would fail, however, getting grades earlier would at the very least give me sufficient time to come up with some sort of excuse for why they're so low when I'm interrogated about them.

There are a few things the College could so to fix this problem. First, professors could e-mail grades to students as soon as they have them calculated. Some professors already do this, which I know I appreciate. Another solution is to post grades on BannerWeb on a rolling basis. Once professors have collected final grades for every student in a course, they can be posted online for students to access. That should speed up the process.

A third solution (one I doubt would be implemented) would be to let students grade themselves. I know what I'd get. Otherwise, how about we don't start another semester until we make sure we didn't fail out during the previous one?