Reply #25: I suspect a whining student. [View All]

[struggle4progress]

I taught for years. Everywhere I ever taught, student complaints about faculty were taken very seriously and given careful consideration.

Almost every faculty member I ever knew bent over backwards to work with students -- whatever the problem was. Typically, one asks the students to document the reasons for unavoidable absences; in rare cases, the student requests an "incomplete" grade due to missing substantial work for good cause.

This works well with almost everybody but not with everybody.

A small number of people play games: they fail to come to a required laboratory listed in the syllabus but file an official complaint that they did not do the laboratory work because the instructor would not explain it to them; they walk into a three-hour final exam five minutes before the exam ends, without any explanation, and then complain the exam was too long to finish; they miss a test, schedule a make-up, miss the make-up without any excuse, and then complain the instructor would not give them a make-up test.

I strongly suspect there's more to this story than a student victimized by unsympathetic instructors.