Is it appropriate to express concerns to a professor about a new exam format?

Question

I'm taking a math class at community college. The class has three regular exams (25% of grade) and a final (25%). Normally, the professor generously grades the fifteen-question exams with partial credit, but because of the COVID-19 crisis, we have had to move everything online.

I received excellent scores on the first two exams, but the third exam we had to take online. In the new, twenty-question format, she obviously could not offer partial credit because a computer scored it. Going into the exam, I didn't feel unprepared, but I ended up getting a terrible 62%. But then, the professor announced that the entire class had performed poorly on the exam, and she gave us another day to retake it. I had already spent an entire day studying and working on the exam, and I knew it would be dropped anyway, so I declined. I still don't think that there was much that would have changed if I took it a second time without being able to see what I got wrong. When I did get it back, I found that several of my mistakes had nothing to do with math and were a result of failing to correctly enter my results into the computer.

I don't know how the rest of the class performed on the exam compared to me, but the professor was concerned enough to give an extra day, so I'm willing to bet it was around the same. Needless to say, I strongly suspect that our collective failure is a result of the new exam format. I think that our grades depended on the partial-credit scoring. And now, the final, worth 25% of my grade, is coming up on May 18th.

I have a 98% in the class. If I get a 60% on the final, it will completely destroy my grade. And what's most disturbing to me is that so far, there has been no correspondence on what the final will look like. In terms of format, I don't know what I'm studying for, exactly. If it is going to be similar to the third exam, then I'm very likely doomed. With my two AP exams also around the corner, in the same week, it is causing an undue amount of stress.

I really appreciate the professor, and I naturally want to remain respectful and stay on good terms with her. Is it appropriate for me to voice my concerns? What kind of language should I use, and which parts of what I have disclosed here are appropriate to include? And what reasonably should I request?

Answer 1

It’s totally appropriate to point out to your professor that your grade is suffering for technical reasons having to do with the online format of the exam. If your professor is reasonable she will not be in the least bit offended by this.

By the way, we are pretty much all dealing with issues of this sort nowadays. I experienced something similar just a few days ago when I gave an online quiz. One of the problems required entering the answer to a question in decimal notation, and this was automatically graded by the testing platform. The correct answer was 15/64=0.234375, but some students assumed it was okay to round off the answer and entered 0.234 or 0.23, only to have that marked off as incorrect. When they emailed me to point out the issue, I gave them the points for the question.

To summarize, let your professor know. Be polite and explain the technical issues in entering the answers that caused your answers to be marked as incorrect. If you explain it clearly and convincingly enough, not only will the professor be in a better position to design a fairer format for the final exam, she may actually give you back some of the points that were marked off in the current exam.

Answer 2

It is perfectly acceptable to give your professor negative feedback on the exam format. You can either do this by email, or you could do it anonymously with an unsigned letter in her pigeonhole on campus (once it is open). Since the exam format was necessitated by the remote learning circumstances due to COVID-19, it is likely that your professor already knows that this format is sub-optimal, and your negative feedback will probably just confirm what she already knows. Once you are back to face-to-face classes, it is likely that she will change back to her previously preferred format.

If you decide it is worth giving negative feedback on the exam format, I suggest you write this with some context that recognises that the professor is operating under remote learning restrictions. Make sure you are polite and appreciative of her work, and frame your feedback as something to give her the experience from the point of view of a student. Generally speaking, professors do not mind negative feedback from students so long as it is constructive and polite.

Answer 3

TL;DR:

Your professor probably does not care about these issues as much as you do. That is a non-problem. Just reach out to your professor and do not sweat over it. Focus on whatever is more important than these grades. Family, sports, opposite/same sex, this does not worth your time.

Longer answer:

If you have a concern about something that affects your life (grades do, unfortunately) why shouldn't you be able to reach out to your professor?

Academics, in general (or at least in theory) are devoted to science and justice. There are some oddballs, yes but that is the kernel of their profession. Why would you spend all your life behind a desk/in a lab if you don't have such passion -even only for the first few years of your profession? Money? That falls under oddballs category. Prestige? Do academics have any prestige in this world at all? Nothing. Dealing with problems is my passion and that case is yours is another problem to be solved.

Don't tell everyone but there is a trick: If you can pose any problem in a brain-tingling way you can lure any academics to pursue any problem. What to do with this information is up to you though. I will not give away all our secrets out of nowhere.

Don't be confrontational, because in that case their first instinct would be to destroy you with facts -that is how academy works: the way of hard science. That is most probably not personal. I said instinct, because in most cases it can't be controlled and maybe even noticed.

Of course this is my experience and my way of interacting with students, and not everyone has to be like this. Yet even if they unwelcoming, what would you lose? Your grade you already lost? Your grade which will be even lower? Latter is why there are boards and ethical committees. They will say some bad words and hurt your feelings? Don't be a special snowflake. There are idiots posing as academics, deal with it. You will not see them next year or the year after but I have to deal with them almost daily.

Just... Just don't be disrespectful and don't be confrontational if you are not ready to play that way. I can tolerate (and even enjoy in a sinister way) confrontation but disrespect is some another level. I can hurt your feelings, and you would brush them off by tomorrow.