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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/BridgeIntrepid6285 on 2023-10-07 06:00:05.
Greetings, everyone! I am hoping to get some insight from others on how best to handle situations like this in the future.
Some background: I am a young (mid 20s) female physics professor at a community college, and this is my first year teaching.
I recently had a student (about 10 years older than me) get very aggressive with me over her exam grade. She failed the exam, and upon receiving her exam score began to raise her voice and blame me for her score. She had missed two weeks of class prior to the exam, was performing poorly on the homework, and did not bother to ever schedule office hours with me. The first thing she told me after she got her score was that she was having a crisis that day and it was unfair that she had to take the exam that day. She had sent me a vague email the day of the exam saying that she “was not feeling well… likely too much stress,” to which I told her if she had a doctor’s note, she could take the exam later that week but no later because it wouldn’t be fair to the other students who had less time to prepare. I recommended that she come in and take the exam with everyone else, even if she didn’t feel as prepared as she’d like because I was allowing students to do test corrections. This was only my suggestion. She then blamed me for making her feel like she “had to come in” because apparently my email made it sound like the test corrections were going to be done the same day in class after the exam, and that’s the only reason she took it that day. It is CLEARLY stated in the syllabus that exam corrections are to be completed within one week of the exam, not the day of the exam…
She also had exam accommodations, and the exam needed to be scheduled through the disabilities services center one week prior to the exam (school policy). I even reminded her when we were one week out from the exam so that she could schedule her exam, but she told me she decided she didn’t need the accommodations. Then the day of the exam she emailed me and said she needed the accommodations so I came to class an hour early to give her an extra hour, which is not required by school policy. The official policy is that any accommodations must be made through the disabilities services center, but at this point it was too late for that since she missed the deadline. I made this clear, but I wanted to be lenient. She ended up turning the exam in after an hour, so she did not even make use of the extended time. Then after receiving her score she had the audacity to tell me me “I know you’re new to teaching so there’s a lot for you to learn and you don’t know how accommodations work.” She then proceeded to tell me how the exam was not appropriately written because sometimes I used words and sometimes I used numbers (welcome to physics!) and it confused her and “it wasn’t appropriate to do that.” There was a lot more back and forth and she grew increasingly agitated and kept raising her voice until I just told her I appreciated the feedback and would take it into consideration for next time. No other students had issues with the exam. I talked to other professors and they said the exam difficulty and results were quite normal.
I consider myself to be extremely lenient and kind, and I would do a lot to support my students and help them succeed. Maybe that was my mistake. It just sucks to see someone take advantage of that and use it against me. Most of my students have expressed a lot of appreciation for how much I go out of my way to support them (I work a full-time job that is not teaching but still make myself available for office hours pretty much every single day of the week including weekends and even did extra exam review the night before the exam, which this student didn’t bother showing up to). This experience kind of ruined things for me and makes me want to be “strict” moving forward, in a sense, to protect myself from this sort of harassment.
how would you have handled a situation like this, and is there anything I can do to avoid this from happening in the future?