Grappling with student complaints?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I would like some advice about how to deal with student complaints. I’m a TA at a university which, to my eye, has some pretty serious issues with grade inflation. Recently, I submitted participation grades for my students and received an unexpectedly large influx of complaints, despite the fact that the average mark I assigned was an A-. Unfortunately, the academic culture here among the undergraduates seems to be to complain until someone capitulates. As much as I would like to counteract this uncharitable sentiment, my feeling has been that many students take a very transactional approach to their classes which is dispiriting. As a TA, I feel I am in a difficult position considering that I don’t have authority about the academic and grading standards for the course.

I'm sorry the OP is dealing with this. I have a lot of syllabus policies to prevent this sort of thing (I don't debate grades, and require detailed written explanations using course material within one week of a grade for grade appeals), but I'm not sure that's all that helpful for a TA. One thought I had here is that "participation grades" can be pretty subjective unless there is some objective way to measure them (e.g., "every student must make one substantive comment or question per session). So, if the OP can tailor their participation credit to be more like this, they might be able to avoid complaints.

Do any other readers have any helpful tips?

Comments

[ex-logic teacher]

I do not know how much control the poster has, but in the situation they describe, they should NOT have participation grades. This would eliminate complaints, and some stress. But if giving such grades is built into the course then they need to find a way to make this manageable. The problem with such grades is that they seem subjective, and the students seem to be taking advantage of this. I used to teach logic, and I would give some grades for assignments - most of the grade was determined by the tests. When I found students were "sharing" work on the problems I just stopped having them graded. And the whole grade was determined by the tests. It reduced my stress significantly. Of course the assignments had pedagogical value ... but I was not going to fuck around with students who were cheating.

[junior faculty]

I opened this post to write the same comment that ex-logic teacher already did. Participation grades are never a good idea due to potential bias, and it sounds like it's an especially bad one in light of the culture at your university. I recommend replacing participation with something less subjective and more easily quantifiable, like simple attendance checks, turning in reading questions at the start of the class (my favorite approach), turning in a worksheet distributed to the students during the class, etc.

[Galen]

I use participation grades, but there is a clear rubric and I enter them in two-week chunks. I also use a very rough-grained grading scale: 0, 1, and 2 out of 2. I still get some complaints, but not many, and it's very easy to respond to them ("you didn't participate in the two-week stretch," "you participated only once," etc.).

[One can never win]

I did attendance checks, but 5% of the class signed and left halfway through. It's not much, but it bothered me: I work a lot on my lectures, memorize them, design slides, etc.
I did participation grade, but then I realized that I was grading personality (shy, bold, shameless) and eliminated the grade. At the end of that semester, students complained that it was "daunting" how much the class essays were worth.
Hence my name.

[Bill V.]

TAs don't usually set the grading scheme, though I agree with the comments that it is better to have objective measures (at minimum a very clear rubric about what kinds of behaviors earn which participation grades).

TAs also aren't responsible for fighting institutional culture, so OP shouldn't try to take that on.

In this sort of case, the TA should ask the instructor of the course how they want to handle these things. (Something like, "I have received your concern and will raise it with Professor X; if she decides to change your grade, I will let you know," might do the trick.)

If for some reason the course instructor is unavailable or unable to provide this kind of coaching, talk to the department chair about the department's expectations around how to grade and how to respond to grade complaints. (FWIW, at some universities, Marcus's syllabus policy could be superseded by the university's grade appeal process.)

[whatever]

I grade students on professionalism, not participation. I give them a clear description of what I mean by 'professionalism' in the syllabus, which I define relative to their standing as students and what being a student is about. I do this more to set a tone than anything else.

In practice, it works like this. 'Obviously', I say, 'it is unprofessional to miss tons of classes, to constantly be on your phone, to always turn work in late, and so on. But of course, I'm not stopping you from skipping, or using your phone, or turning in work late. Those are your choices'.

At the end of the semester I think holistically in assigning this grade, and my Week 1 bark is much louder than my Week 15 bite.

[Egalitarianism Ain't All Its Cracked Up To Be]

I sympathize with OP. This is a growing problem, and it can feel like the administration does not have your back. After all, why would they care about something quaint like classroom instruction and grades when there's millions of dollars of grant/athletic/donor money to worry about?

The culture in academia has shifted. Strict, mean, scary professors that many of us over 30 remember from our own school days are a rarity. As such, I think it's become harder to be a nice guy/gal in the classroom because the students have not been conditioned to fear/respect their teachers by the strict teachers who act like drill sergeants.

As a rebellious young man and student myself, it was hard for me to adjust to being the authority figure. I remember resenting a lot of the disciplinarian coaches, teachers, profs, and other older people in my life when growing up. I wanted them to all be kind, mellow, and soft-spoken.

Is it possible to imitate R. Lee Ermey as an adjunct or TA in academia today? Probably (what do other posters think?), you just need a thick skin and willingness to ignore the complaints. Or, maybe even better, you need to get Yosemite Sam mad, angry, and red-faced and the students will fear you. But that's not the kind of person I want to be, and you probably don't want to be that person either.

Now for some practical advice: one of the best parts about being or having a TA is parrying unjustified student complaints by tossing them back and forth between the TA and the prof.

Try sending students who complain to the prof. Because many of these complainers are lazy, they will never schedule that next meeting, and the problem will fizzle out. You can also experiment with some "good cop, bad cop" or "wait 'till your father gets home" psychological strategies.

If they say that the prof can't judge this issue because the prof wasn't present to observe participation (in TA sections), you can ask the complainer to write down their contributions to class discussions and use that as a basis for discussion. Again, the extra effort will cause many to give up.

[Peter Finocchiaro]

This isn’t immediately helpful to the OP, but I wanted to offer some pushback against commenters arguing against participation grades. In my discussion seminars, I pair the participation grade with regular “progress reports” on that participation. In the beginning, these are usually as simple as “you need to talk more” or “you need to talk less”. But the unstated goal is to open a dialogue with the individual student about their individual participation style and how to cultivate the best person of that. One nice side-effect is that students typically feel that the final participation grade I give them is less arbitrary.

Of course this progress report strategy can’t scale to larger classrooms. In those contexts I agree with the other commentators — replace participation with something more easily measured.

I agree that the way they are usually used are not helpful and vulnerable to bias.

[Kapto]

Re. participation: I do a "bump" for good participation, making it clear the students will benefit if they participate regularly and helpfully (but not merely if they talk often). But it's not officially part of their grade breakdown. Rather, it's a potential ground for overriding the official breakdown, giving them extra points. I've found that this encourages participation without making them feel entitled to a grade-related outcome, or an explanation for its absence.

An added benefit of doing it this way, instead of as an official part of the grade, is it cuts down on loudmouths talking for its own sake.

Re. complaints more generally, my own approach is to first express a general willingness to hear complaints, to consider that I made an error ("I'm human, overworked, it could be me," is the sort of thing I say, "I might have been mistaken"), but then, after a little lapse, to firmly dispute the particular complaint on substance (if it's wrong, which it usually is). This has worked well. They feel listened to, and most of them had no expectation of winning the point anyway; they're just playing the odds.

[AnonyBons]

I give participation grades and I don't think this is as subjective as people think. I usually have a class of 30 which maybe helps in this regard. I feel like by the end of the term I have a pretty good sense of who's participating and contributing something to discussion (we constantly participate in professional discussions ourselves, doesn't this give us some awareness here?). The virtue of participation grades is that it also gives you some wiggle room in calculating the final grade.

[Tk]

I want to try some actionable advise off the top of my head .
Here are some things I’d pursue as yes, I think this could possibly hurt you a lot in some circumstances and I would get ahead of it if you can.it is also just not nice to have this come up when someone googles you.

1 if the original poster/commenter(s) on the Reddit post still have accounts, even inactive ones, made a Reddit account and DM them basically what you did here. Give you’re sorry and would they be willing to edit their code, given how important it is to you and the disproportionate effect it could have. Likely they have moved past their upset and will be willing to help you by deleting it.

2 failing 1 maybe you can report the post or pester Reddit admin, threatening slander or some bullshit. Just bother them til they take it down, if this is something they do. Maybe send a letter from a lawyer (or ChatGPT)

3 I am technically illiterate (see 2) but maybe you can hire a company to improve your google profile so that it is pushed farther down the ranks. Or other things are pushed up. I have no idea how this stuff works and it it’s possible (if other commenters want to enlighten me is appreciate it

4 if none of that works or is feasible, make a Reddit account and weigh in on the top comment on the Reddit thread as yourself, to give the context you gave here. That way if someone reads it you can at least control the narrative like companies do with bad reviews on yelp. Don’t be defensive or amateurish, just state that you’re sorry that this happened, you wish they’d come to you first, you’ve worked to improved your teaching in light of feedback, you were inexperienced then, and point the reader to the positive comment that you say is buried in the thread.

5 sometimes Google gives very different results for only soigtlly different queries. For example, maybe the offending result is not retuned when your middle name is in the search query. If something like that works, you could change how you write your name on the CV and therefore change what people are likely to search for.

6 for years there has been this thing called rate my professor. Most people on hiring committeees know about this and are smart enough not to put too much stock in an anonymous internet comment. So it isn’t likely going to be the different beteeen success and failure and wouldn’t worry too much about it if you can’t scrub it.

[G]

I feel that I have a good sense of people’s level of participation, but I do not capture this by grades. For my class, I usually assign As for some really good participants, and A- for those who are there but do not participate in the discussion as often as others. And the participation only takes up no more than 10% of the final grade. I have a separate “attendance” category. I just want to distinguish the really good participants from others, but I do not want others to suffer much by my own subjective assessment.

I have two reasons. First, I find participation is extremely hard to measure given how different my students are. For example, I sometimes had one or two students who were very talkative, but the points they made were not very thoughtful. Practically, they moved the conversation forward when others were silent, so I appreciated their participation. They also made the classroom culture more active and conversational. But should they get A for participation, or A-, or B+? I feel that it is hard to say. Meanwhile, I had at least two students in the past who wrote great papers but never talked in class. One of them was nervous. But the other one told me that they really wanted to think about something throughly before talking, and they always felt that their thoughts were premature. they are a serious thinker, and should they be punished for not speaking up? I do not think so. But how should the talkative but less serious thinker compare with the less talkative but serious thinker? I do not know. Should they both get A-, or B+, or A?

Second, and related to the first point, I feel less and less sure about what skills or learning outcome participation is supposed to measure. Communication skills? Is a philosophy course supposed to develop people’s oral communication skills? Hmm… to some extent, but we can assign presentations or other activities. Participation seems to be more about thinking and having a constructive conversation. But if so, does the less talkative, more serious thinker demonstrate the skills of a constructive communicator, or the less serious, more talkative one? Well… again I am not sure.

anyway, that’s my two cents.

[Michel]

As the TA and the one who assigned the grade, I think you do have to meet these students during your office hours to discuss their grade, if they show up and ask to talk about it. You do not have an obligation to hold this discussion over email, and should not do so.

If they still feel aggrieved afterwards, then they should escalate to the instructor. After the initial discussion, your job as TA is over. (FWIW, my experience was that instructors tended to back up the TA, unless something had clearly gone awry).

[AnonyBons]

In some ways this is a reply to G. I don't assign letter grades I just make a note of "check+," "check" for good participation and little participation respectively. If you have a "check+" this gives you a bump in the final grade, but really only affects you if you are on the boarder between grades. So someone who's on the boarder of a "B+/A-" would get bumped up say. While I don't always count a lack of participation against a straight A student, I do think that we should encourage the shy students to "learn how to ask questions/raise points" in class. This is a skill like any other and one that's particularly relevant in a philosophy class which relies on the socratic method. So I don't have a problem telling the shy students they should try to speak up a little. How else are they going to learn this if they don't practice it in their classes? On their jobs? That seems to late. I would prefer to nudge them along now so they are prepared for later life or grad school or whatever it may be.

[Mert Karaca]

First of all, I personally don’t mind grade inflation. If a student does everything that is expected of them in a timely and adequate manner, they should get at least a B in the class. I think we moved past the idea that doing the bare minimum equals barely passing. After all, an undergraduate degree is not that big of a deal anymore anyways. That being said, I think punitive grading altogether hinders philosophical pedagogy.

About participation grades… I think students should be rewarded for their contribution to class discussions. There are couple of things that I do that make participation and grading it easier for the students and me, respectively. (1) I count attending office hours, exchanging emails related to the material, or even active listening and note-taking as participation. This way, I give them more opportunities to get involved with the material even if they are a little shy about talking in class. (2) I enter their participation grades around the fourth or fifth week of the semester. I tell them, “This is the participation grade I have in mind for you based on your participation so far. It can go up or down based on whether you increase or decrease your participation for the rest of the semester” It works as a feedback system for them by helping them quantify my expectations and assessment. We give feedback for their written works all over the semester. I think we should give feedback on their participation, too. I also tell them, “If you think you deserve a different grade, or if you want to know why I gave you this grade, come talk to me during office hours”. This has two functions. First, it is feedback from students on my grading. Second, it somehow front loads those complaints that come at the end of the semester. And I update their participation grades every three or four weeks, based on how they changed their participation since the last update. (3) I haven’t been giving a final exam for a while now, but when I did, I put a bonus question at the end of the exam (like +1 points out of 100 for the final) asking them what they think their participation grade should be. Interesting enough, most of the students were giving themselves lower grades than what I would’ve given them. So, just before the semester ends, asking them what they think they deserve as their participation grade and starting a dialogue from there might address some of the justification concerns they have.

Hope these might inspire some other mechanisms that would work for you.