Grades are everything when you’re in school. We are conditioned to retain and regurgitate information at all levels of academia, just so we can earn letters that pretty much dictate most of our futures.
These letters, A-F, hold so much power in our lives that receiving the wrong one could literally throw your life into disarray. I know this from experience, as this summer was a packed schedule.
I was taking a full online class load of five classes while working at Sinclair as an ambassador, as well as working at a summer school teaching kids reading and writing skills.
I was busy, but despite all that I still managed to pull out pretty good grades for all my classes except one. I won’t tell you what class but I can tell you the letter grade was not so F-antastic!
I went through a pretty complex series of steps to deal with this event and I am going to explain all so that if you have to go through it, you know how to handle it also.
Step 1: Receive the bad grade and stare at it! Stand there in disbelief and try with all your willpower to turn it into the grade you want or think you deserve. In your shock and disbelief, your mind starts to conjure all of the worst case scenarios because of this one bad grade!
You see yourself in a life of destitution, begging on the street. You’re living out of a cardboard box, all because of this grade.
You curse the instructor, you curse his family and contemplate making a voodoo doll effigy to torture him until he gives you a better grade! You decide against this as you curl up into a ball and cry a deep manly sob because you have no way to obtain a piece of that instructor’s hair.
Step 2: Breathe! After what seems like hours of pitying yourself and your situation you realize you can’t be the only person in history to have received a bad grade, even if it feels like it. There has to be something you can do.
So you contact the professor who gave you the bad grade and see if they’re willing to work with you, then you contact your Ombudsman. Arrange a meeting, and gather any information that is relevant to why you believe that you should have a different grade.
Step 3: Meet with the Ombudsman and plead your case. The Ombudsman is your advocate in all academic and some nonacademic matters. They are there to be a reasonable voice, a shoulder to cry on and a person in your corner. They’ll always let you state your case.
Try and make the Ombudsman see that you are a scholar among scholars. That even though you had a hectic schedule and missed a few assignments, that you were helping make the world a better place and should not be penalized for that!
After your passionate speech sit down and listen to the Ombudsman. They will tell you the harsh truth you need to hear, and realize that sometimes things get out of hand and we need to have balance.
Understand what they’re saying. Take it in and listen… then set up a meeting with the chair of the department, because that’s all true but no way do you deserve a not so F-antastic grade!
Step 4: Meet with the chair of the subject you received the F-antastic grade in. Plead your case, be elegant, poetic, a mixture of Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare and Johnny Cochran all mixed into one.
Finish and wait for the answer the chair gives it to you; it’s fair and just, but not the answer you were looking for. You fight back the urge to ask for a piece of the chair’s hair.
Step 5: Retake the class begrudgingly. The best outcome from the chair is a W for withdrew from class but the grade will not affect your GPA and as soon as you take the class and get a better grade, that grade will replace the bad one and your life will be back on track.
The birds will sing, the sun will shine and life will go on. You are back on the road to a great future with not one cardboard box in sight!
Justin A. Baker
Staff Writer