Grades are Due

This morning is the most stressful time of the semester for department chairs. Grades must be entered onto the computer mainframe by 10:00 am. What this means is that I have to verify that all of the department’s faculty get their grades entered for each section they teach. In our department that is about 70 sections.

What makes the time table so precise is that we have graduation two days after grades are due. Apparently, it takes a period of time to get the final grades into the system so that we can see who has not met their final course requirements (i.e. those who have failed). (It falls to the Deans of each college to make the phone calls to seniors who have failed to pass their final classes of the year. They must tell the students that they have failed and should call back all their friends and family and request that they not come to graduation---because the student will not be walking the stage. This onerous task has earned for that day the sobriquet "Black Wednesday". )

But I digress.

This morning, I arrived in the office and our secretary went through our classes in order to determine who had not yet turned in their grades. At 10:00 am, the computer locks out anyone else from entering in the grades. The provost of the university calls the individual college deans and lets them know what faculty have not yet turned in their grades.

The deans then call the faculty chairs who must chase after the faculty and get them to turn in their grades online. (The provost kicks the deans, who then kick the chairs, who then look vainly for someone else to kick.) What makes this challenging is the fact that last week was finals week and after the last class period, faculty are even more elusive than they are during the regular semester.

Someone in the department always screws up and gets too close to the deadline. This morning was no different. We had seven classes (and three faculty members) who had not turned in their grades as we neared the deadline.

I then had to deal with the following situations:

Teacher #1 is an adjunct who stated that he thought the 10:00 deadline meant 10:00 PM.

Hmmm.

I chose to believe him and confessed to him that I might not have specified the pm. Maybe I’ll convert the department to military time to avoid future conflicts. To make amends, he emailed me his students’ grades. In the process, he shattered numerous state and federal privacy laws. “Please don’t do that again.” I gently requested through clenched teeth.

The other two ne’er do wells were full time faculty members who have been teaching for years. In each case they waited until the last minute, encountered difficulties that kept them from getting the grades entered into the computer. Then the 10:00 (am) deadline hit and they were locked out of the campus computer system.

Teacher #2 mentioned that she thought that 10:00 am wasn’t the real deadline, but that I had set the deadline artificially early in order to get all the grades in on time. I told her no, that 10:00 was the real deadline but I liked her idea. “In May,” I told her, “your grades will be due by Friday at 5:00 pm.”

Teacher #3 deducts points due to absences unless they are substantiated by a doctor. But he didn’t set a deadline on the time that the students needed to get their excuses to him. So this morning he was on the phone with students and with their doctors trying to substantiate excuses. He was also repeatedly calling our department secretary from his home asking her to check the fax machine.

While validating the fact that he went the extra mile for his students, I “encouraged” him to plan a bit better in advance so that this won’t happen again. Finally, I asked the IT guys if they could open up the grades for another hour. They generously complied.

By far, the most stressful day of the semester, and what made it stressful was dealing with faculty, not students.