Would you/ how would you respond to this email?

[GameOldBirdz]

Students received their marks on Friday.

They had to do two pieces of work.

Student emailed to say he was "baffled" (his words) by the marks as he'd received a lower mark for the piece of work which was "by far the higher quality piece of work" (his words again)

There's no question in the email so nothing to directly respond to IYSWIM.

Would you respond to this email? If so, what the fuck would you say without using the words "jumped up little tosser"?

I'm leaning towards just not bothering to respond as ultimately I don't give a fuck if he's "baffled"

the patronising comments on here

I'm tending to draw the conclusion that sometimes people don't like experts exercising their expertise, and so call them patronising.

you constantly run he gauntlet of rejection from peers, journals, research proposals, book editors, conference audiences, and you have to have the guts to still stand up in front of hundreds of students and say something informative and engaging

That's interesting - I don't think I have nerves of steel - I'm just interested in the arguments, the ideas, and open debate about the ideas. I wonder whether my 'open debate' is other people's 'arrogance'. The fact that I know my stuff, and can argue it, is seen by some people as patronising etc etc etc.

I wonder whether academics generally have a much higher threshold for this sort of thing - we engage in debate about ideas every single day of our working lives - and are used to it in a way that a lot of other people aren't.

Anyway, a bit off-topic re students' clumsy or graceless or complaining emails. Not had any of those in this exam round yet, but results come out next week, so am expecting a flurry of hurt emails, generally sent from phones, and so devoid of
"Dear Nimble,

blah blah blah

Best wishes,
A student."

it's more usually

"Hi there, I need to come and see you about my dissertation mark before I go on holidays" sent at 1am on Saturday night.

@nimblejumper I'm lucky if I get a 'Hi' ...

Ach, come off it NImble...you referred to my post as a cliche because my experience did not tally with yours. And then when I called you on it, you offered me a fecking reading list! Do you not see how that might be construed as patronising? Not even a teensy-weensy bit?

But then I guess what would I know? I have a doctorate, have published monographs, book chapters, papers in high impact journals and articles in the national press but, as am not an academic, I can't possibly know my stuff or how to construct an argument, right?

I wonder - and I'm just projecting - if this professor isn't perhaps telling a story against himself, simply? People do that. I can imagine saying 'oh, and then I was taken down by a bright young thing, and now I know my limits!'

Or maybe he really did have some kind of breakdown, which is sad.

I can't imagine a situation where any of his colleagues would have thought badly of him, though, so it's not a normal reaction.

I do find it a bit sad, the idea that concentrating on your teaching as a professor is somehow seen as a bad thing, and evidence you must have struggled. Some people like teaching! There's an emerita professor in my department (btw, hamlet, if you're emerita/us you stay so - that's what the term means - unless something very odd happens. It's a polite way of saying retired) who goes to every single graduate event. She attends literally dozens of MPhil and PhD student papers each year. She's under no obligation - she just genuinely thinks it's important and enjoyable.

I don't see it as arrogance to feel frustrated by a rude email. They're hard to deal with.

The thing is, one poorly composed email is fine, but I think non-academics, or those who don't have student contact have to realise is that you can get hundreds of these emails at certain times of year.

They also add a lot of time onto general admin because you have to do detective work- an email that says 'Why did I get a bad mark in my essay?' Means I have to work out 1) who you are 2) which programme you're on 3) which module you're referring to and 4) which assignment you're talking about.

I don't mind getting lots of the same email. I do mind knowing that, if I preface each course with a quick (and I mean quick) primer on professional courtesy, I will alienate a lot of students. And, almost always, they were the ones who needed the lesson. I tried it one year - I just included a paragraph in the intro notes about how long to expect to wait for a reply, and some examples of FAQs where there are better options than emailing me. Still got a lot of complaints from students who considered it injurious to their dignity to be told these obvious things about reading the course handbook or checking out the marking guidelines.

LRD I have a list of FAQs about the exams for my courses, they are exceptionally comprehensive, but I also say that students are of course welcome to email me if they have read the FAQs and the answer isn't in there. This has headed off about 90% of exam queries! I think they fear looking stupid if their question was in the list...

See - and I do love my students - I can almost guarantee that, were I to compile such a list of FAQs, they would correspond almost perfectly to the commonest email topics over exam term.

I can't really be cross. God knows I'm sure I've done the same.

LRD I've outwitted them, I send it by email to all two weeks before the Easter holidays, so just before they start revising...I honestly think I'm winning this one!

Now if I could only crack the no-shows in office hours, with a deluge of students the week before an essay is due, all miffed they have to wait for the other students who also didn't come in the 6 previous weeks...

I will try that!

Your attitude is really bad. You should be encouraging students to question, asking how they improve. At the very least provide them with the policy on remarks.

I make myself available for at least 2 designated office hours every week during term time and exam periods. Guess how many students have come to speak to me during those office hours in my entire career as an academic. If you guessed zero, you'd be entirely correct.

I put the office hours in the handbook and on the VLE. But they'd rather send me an email with no subject line at 1am on a Sunday and no greeting or sign off. Then another one on Monday morning complaining that I haven't replied yet. Of course, I have office hours 11-12 on a Monday so they could have come to see me after the lecture they didn't attend . It's clearly a much better idea to send me increasingly irate emails instead.

Milady 0?! Bloody hell! Ours complain if you go an hour without someone.

Milady I think we must work in the same place as my experiences are identical!!

The policy on remarking is almost certainly that there is no remarking.

Why do you say that Milady? Lots of places offer remarks.

Last week I had a student come and see me because she'd failed her coursework and wanted to go through her feedback. Fine. Except she didn't bring the coursework or feedback with her, it's marked anonymously and I wouldn't be able to remember it anyway so there was nothing I could tell her.

And then I asked her how she thought her exams had gone. She then told me she didn't turn up to them.

So that was a good use of my time. ARRGH.

Fucking hell. There's a reason that when many of us get a chair we try to do as little teaching as possible.

siamaria out of interest what remarking? I've never heard of an institution that has a remarking policy? At the request of students who are unhappy with the mark? Theirin lies madness!

Where I am if they want a remark they need to appeal via the student union and this is if they are still unhappy after the mark has been explained to them in detail.

Yes Boos. It's not used anything like as much as you'd expect.

I think students always assume we know much more about their individual circumstances than we do, though. It's not necessarily arrogance - sometimes it's just nervousness/paranoia that the whole department is talking about them. So I've had students assume I know what their exam results were, or what feedback they got last year, because they think they stand out as being bad.

So any student can appeal any mark on any grounds and it gets remarked? Who does The remarking! What if the remark is lower than the original?

I've never ever come across this before and I am shocked it is not widely used by the students for whom it is an option. All the institutions I have had any knowledge of have an appeal process but the grounds of appeal are the marking process not the mark, e.g. not 'my paper was undervalued' but there was an irregularity in the marking process.