Tuesday, August 07, 2012

When did a B+ become the new F?

I have had a number of students complain I gave them bad grades. When I ask them what grade they got many of them say a B+. I have tried to explain to students that a C is average and that a B+ is a very good grade. But, they all think that they should get As and that anything less including an A- is a poor mark. Has anybody else ever encountered this problem?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Most of them probably are not there to learn, but to get a paper, with a number in it, that will help them compete later.

Anyhow, does this software allow you to whitelist some of the commenters (me, for example), so hat they don't have to do captcha and go to moderation? If not, could you, maybe, switch to wordpress?

Thanks.

J. Otto Pohl said...

I do not know if I can whitelist some commentators or not. It has never come up. My understanding of technology is still basically 20th century. Anything the least bit complicated and I need to get a graduate student or call ICT to help me. I don't want to switch to wordpress. For one thing I have no way to pay them here in Africa.

Anonymous said...

It's free: wordpress.com

And it has this feature called "Akismet", that detects and automatically blocks spam. Or so they say. But I believe this is true, more or less.

Also, I believe, you can configure it in such a way that every new commenter goes into the moderation queue, but once you approve them once, they can comment in real time. Like the CT assholes' blog; they use wordpress.

Anonymous said...

...or, and I can help you configure it (or this one), if you want. I am an IT guy...

J. Otto Pohl said...

Thank you for the offer, but it seems a lot of work to speed up comments by a few hours. You might have noticed, but you are just about the only person that comments on this blog and that is fairly recent. I have routinely gone months without a single comment. I suspect this is a function of my extremely small audience. I am pretty sure that I personally know the vast majority of the dozen or so people who read this blog regularly.