Cezary Podkul | Students deserve grade feedback

Just in time for Halloween, let's talk about a spooky trend that's all too common these days.

It's the end of the semester. You recover from your exams and the post-exam revelry, log on to Penn InTouch and check out your transcript to see how you did. It all looks good, except you wonder how you got a much lower-than-expected grade in that one class.

Sound familiar?

If you're like most Penn students and have had your grades miss your expectations once or twice, it should. And, if like most students caught in that situation, you find yourself struggling to get an explanation about how your final grade was calculated, sadly, you're not alone.

It may seem to be common sense that students should be able to know precisely how their final grades each semester are calculated. But, remarkably, teaching staff are not required to disclose such information - and it's high time that they should be.

To be certain, not all students' complaints about final grades are legitimate; some will complain no matter what. But, as History teaching assistant and fourth-year graduate student Rami Ragavani explains, "I was also once a student. And I got grades I didn't like, and I complained too. So I understand."

Behind each complaint, though, Ragavani expects a constructive and well-thought ou t argument for why students believe things should have been different.

So, there is room for legitimate inquiries as to why a particular grade came out the way it did. Part of the learning process, after all, is finding out why we fail to meet our own expectations and improving as a result. In such cases, then, it is obvious that the TA or professor should answer such a request in due course.

However, far too often, teaching staff view such complaints or grade inquiries as a hassle or inconvenience - whether legitimate or not - and therefore ignore them completely or refuse to answer them.

And, under Penn's faculty guidelines, they can do that.

"Certainly [the faculty] are not under any obligation to share that information," School of Arts and Sciences Director of Academic Affairs Kent Peterman said. He added that the School of Arts and Sciences publishes guidelines, not explicit policies, by which faculty must conduct themselves at their discretion.

"This is not a police state," Peterman said.

Indeed, according to the University's Guidelines for Responsible Behavior by Standing Faculty, "Faculty prepare a syllabus for each course at the beginning of the term that includes information about the anticipated course requirements and methods of evaluation. Throughout the course, the assignments and standards of evaluation are clear and are applied fairly."

However, clarity and fairness should not equal secrecy. For example, last year, Greg Smithies, a Wharton senior, e-mailed his TA for a management class to inquire about how his final grade was determined

"She flat-out said that she couldn't tell me how she calculated the grade," said Smithies, who eventually gave up and stopped trying to figure it out.

It only makes sense, though, that the results of individual assessments should not be withheld from the individuals to whom they belong.

Hence, it's sad that, for Smithies and others in the same situation, the only recourse they have when the teaching staff refuses to share grade information is to appeal to the department chair to request disclosure. Or, if that fails, the school dean.

But with so much politics and so much bureaucracy, it hardly seems worthwhile. Hence, like Smithies, most students eventually give up, even though they undoubtedly deserve an explanation rather than a cold shoulder.

The University ought to do more to encourage its teaching staff to be as transparent as possible in informing students about their class performance; full disclosure and transparency should be something ingrained in the culture of the teaching staff. It should be ingrained through training and common principle so that outright refusals to inform students may be looked down upon more severely and eventually ostracized. For Penn may not be a police state - but neither should it be a secret state.

Cezary Podkul is a College and Wharton fifth-year senior from Franklin Park, Ill. His e-mail address is podkul@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Salad Strikes Back appears on Tuesdays.

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