First Time Being Complained About by a Student
Although it was White Valentine’s Day, I wasn’t having a good day. For the first time, a student lodged a strong complaint about me to the boss…
Below is the original complaint and my reply. (If the complainant sees this blog and thinks I’ve infringed their copyright, I’ll delete it to avoid an even higher-level complaint.)
Professor Wan:
Please forgive me for sending this venting email. Here’s the thing: last semester I took the WinCE Program Development course, and my final grade was “Good.” When I asked “Teacher” He Zongjian about the reason, he told me the grade was given randomly, and that the number of “Excellent” grades was capped at 25% by school policy — if exceeded, the教务处 system would automatically change some to “Good.” This disappointed me greatly — not about the grade, but about “Teacher” He Zongjian.
Please put yourself in my shoes — isn’t it unfair to students who worked hard to have grades given randomly? Others’ hard work gets erased by someone’s irresponsibility. I won’t elevate this to the level of “teaching ethics,” but even from this small matter, you can see a person’s attitude. I admit “Teacher” He Zongjian has technical skills, but as a “teacher,” I haven’t seen him take responsibility toward us students. With such an attitude, how can he progress further academically?
Professor Wan has always praised “Teacher” He Zongjian in front of us, holding him up as a role model. I think I need to see this dialectically — I’ll learn from his technical skills, but I have reservations about his attitude. What do you think? “Teacher” He Zongjian is also young. Enough said — I’ll see what achievements he has in 20 years.
As a Software School student, I’ve always been attached to the college, but after this incident, I can’t help feeling some resentment. Please forgive me. I hope you’ll pay attention to such issues in your work. I don’t want to leave Tongji University with dissatisfaction toward the college.
This email is also copied to “Teacher” He.
Professor Wan:
Here’s the situation: Last year I led several teams in the Innovation Cup embedded competition. I promised that students participating in the competition could have their final grades considered higher. So基本上 all competition students received Excellent or Good.
Today the preliminary results came out — 8 teams advanced to the semifinals, including this student’s group. But some members of their group didn’t get Excellent. I told him that Excellent and Good were somewhat random — if I gave everyone Excellent, there would be too many (actually the grades had strict criteria; I personally reviewed and interviewed each student for their projects. It was only for the competition students that the Excellent/Good designation was somewhat arbitrary). His main goal was for me to ask the registrar to change their grades. I said grades couldn’t be changed once entered. Then he said he would quit and withdraw from the competition, and left.
Thinking about it, I did handle many things improperly. I was too casual with my words and didn’t expect to anger this student, causing negative影响 among students and trouble for you, Professor Wan. I’m truly sorry. I’ll be careful with my words and actions in the future.
He Zongjian
Not going to debate who’s right or wrong. After this experience, my reflections:
- The art of speaking and watching your mouth is very important.
- “Grades are students’ lifeline” is an unbreakable truth. Back when I was in accounting school, I lent my paper to someone to copy, and they got Excellent while I got Average. I was so wronged. But there was no one to complain to back then. Now the boomerang has hit me.
- The nature of school work: no fixed office hours, but tons of miscellaneous tasks, never a free moment. Many things I don’t even know if they’re my responsibility. A student also asked me to help set up Virtual PC and Linux environment — I felt it wasn’t in my job scope and would take too much time, so I refused. Wonder if that’ll get me complained about too.
- I’m getting old. I don’t want to argue with anyone anymore. Looking at my posts from 2003 on the Tongji BBS — I was so young and aggressive. Why am I aging so fast? IT, ah IT.
- I resolved to sleep early, but it’s 3am again. And I wasn’t playing games or browsing the web — I was working.