Policy Exception

If you've been following the blog, you know that I have a policy of not disclosing my semester grades. I'm not going back into the whole reasoning; you'll just have to re-read the previous blog post. When people ask me my grade in a given class, I simply tell them I passed. However, I'm going to make an exception for one class: Professional Responsibility.

There were two exams whose grade I was fearing from the fall semester. One was Property II (which will be the lowest I have ever received and which is STILL not in - talk about torture) and the other was Professional Responsibility.

There are a couple of reasons I didn't do well on the exam. First, going to class was pretty well pointless. The professor sat at the front of the class and read out of the textbook. Trust me, I am at the point in my life where I can read all by myself. Every now and again, he would pause and mention one of the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility...and then promptly say that the rule did not help us in our scenario. When it came time to the exam, he said the Model Rules were very important in answering the questions. What happened to "this rule doesn't help us here" or "this is a silly rule because no one would ever be confronted with this situation in real life"?

Second, it's an ethics class. There is more than one right answer to the question. And in some of the questions (as admitted by the professor himself), no one would ever be confronted with the situation. It's tough answering questions that have no answer. Funnily enough, I've been doing it for a year and a half now.

Third, I was generally just not motivated to study and take exams. Yeah, I read the entire book, and yeah, I read and learned all of the rules. But I was tired. It was a rough semester. I "learned" what I needed to know, but didn't really learn it.

Fourth, I had computer issues. I showed up to the final with the intention of typing all of my answers on the computer. (It was a 40 question short answer exam. The professor warned us ahead of time to be patient with him because he had 40 questions times 100 students to grade, not to mention his other classes. He basically told us he wasn't going to closely grade the exam because of the time it would take. That could have worked out to my advantage or it could have worked to my detriment. I still say it was BS. He chose to give us that kind of exam. He could have given us a multiple choice exam, given it to someone else to run through the scanner, and then forced the results into a curve. But what do I know?) However, I learned at the very start of the exam that my computer was not going to work. The test software (which I was forced to update by the test software people) was conflicting with my firewall and would not start up. I spent the first 10 minutes trying to fix it before deciding that writing my answers was the only course of action remaining. Not good for me because I can't write big; not good for my professor because I can't write big.

With all that said, here is the grade I got in the class: Pass.

No, really. That's what I got. I tell everyone I passed all of my classes (so far), but I don't tell them the letter grade I got. But in this class, I passed and can honestly say I got a Pass as a grade. Let me elaborate further.

Here's the thing. Our professor was really old. If I had to guess (and I do), I would say he was pushing 80 or 85. He missed about a quarter of the semester with health issues. When he came back, he was in a wheelchair and on oxygen.

Last weekend, I was checking the class schedule to make sure they hadn't moved any of my classes to a different day and to see which rooms my classes were in. I noticed that all of this professor's classes for the spring had been cancelled (which I told Hayley was not a good sign).

Then on Tuesday, I got an email from someone in the registrars office saying that the grades would be posted that day. The email said that due to unforeseen circumstances, the exams couldn't be graded. As such, we would receive a grade of "Pass" for the class, get credit for taking the class, and would not have our GPAs affected. I'll take that Pass and run with it.

This is good news for me, especially since I was really worried about this grade. I got credit for a class that doesn't affect my GPA. At the same time, I can't help but feel bad. I don't know what the deal is with the professor, but I hope he's alright. Hopefully I get to see him getting pushed around in his wheelchair today (the first day of class...ugh).