Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

First time we have online submission of grades. It’s only online for a certain number of hours a day, though, which started sometime last week. Less paperwork, no more need to verify the shadings and the signatures for corrections.

I still remember two terms ago when our secretary left me at the verification room with the grading sheets of about a dozen co-faculties of mine. They made me clearly shade the grading sheets of almost half of them. My poor writing hand. What’s ironic is that it was the term I had two change of grades from not having shaded the last grade for two of the classes. So much for verification then.

All of the students in Astronomy were surprised that they got higher than they expected. Some asked for a higher grade, but only because they now realized there was a possibility of them getting Dean’s List. I told them I only consider those who prepared for that since the beginning of the term and already took opportunity of all of the bonuses given, and not as an afterthought.

Most of the laboratory students also were surprised with their grades. The only exceptions asked to see the breakdown of grades. Of course, these classes did not get to compute their pre-final grades because they fulfilled the bulk of the requirements within the week of finals.
One student asked me to give him the one point he needs to get the next highest grade. I told him I couldn’t do that because he doesn’t deserve it, and I can’t give him additional work on the last day of the term because it would be unfair to his classmates.

Another student, who just got the course card of her classmate, could not believe the grade was so low because she said her classmate was always the one leading the group in performing the experiment. She asked me to reconsider the low grade on one of her written reports (of which only a disk file was submitted) but it wasn’t enough to give her classmate a higher grade than her. This was because her classmate had the lowest score in the final exam, 23 out of 30.

There was also the misunderstanding about the submission of the written reports. They said they all brought printouts on the day of submission, but someone told them erroneously that they were only supposed to submit the disk files. They were properly deducted for the assumption.

Tomorrow is a holiday, but the offices will still be open in the morning so I’ll be able to post one more time before the Holy Week.