jussayin: as you write up your stories, remember to clean them of identifying information! as much as we might like to laugh at ridiculous people, it's not great if this is the way a story gets back to them.
now a story from me:
i've mentioned in the college thread that i work as a TA during the school year. part of my responsibility is leading a discussion/work section, which instructors typically use to give smaller, more focused programming assignments. this past spring i worked for an instructor who did exactly that. grading was pretty much a spot check - when they finish, they'd have to flag me down and show me that their program worked as intended, and i'd also do a quick look at their code just to be sure there wasn't any ~magical print statement wizardry~ going on (happens more often than you'd think). the system worked well: it meant i never had to take code over email, and score bookkeeping pretty much all happened during class time. i would always keep two copies of marks, one paper, one electronic.
during the last week of classes, i invited any student from the whole class to come to me and finalize their last grades. this session would be the hard assignment deadline. since there were obviously students i didn't recognize, each time someone gave me something to score, i asked their name to be absolutely sure i recorded it for the right person. it went fairly well even for being the last-minute deadline. pretty much everyone that came in was able to sit, work, and show me something working by the end, and i had all their names down etc.
enter the grade grubber.
someone not from my section emailed the instructor and claimed to be missing roughly half the grades for these little weekly assignments, and they mentioned going to my session to show me the last two. this was actually a student we'd been worried about for some time and couldn't manage to get in touch with. the TA for their section couldn't even remember who they were, it had been so long since they'd made an appearance in class; the only thing we were really sure of was that they were still on the roster, so they hadn't dropped.
two instant problems with the student's story from my end:
- the first of those two grades wouldn't change anyway, because it was past due by then. the instructor announced the policy rather well, so they would have had to disregard almost every channel of communication to miss it.
- i have no record of this student even coming to me. like, zero recorded attempts. having talked to everyone in the room (it's not like it was a huge rush), i seriously doubt i missed them.
that other TA checked, and the story couldn't possibly match the attendance record either. (they were challenging their attendance grade too, of all things.)
now, it's not up to me to decide what's a legitimate excuse to make up an assignment, but having been brought into the discussion because of my involvement, i didn't see even an attempt at one. long-time educators like to joke about how many grandparents start dying as the term ends, but this wasn't that - this was a challenge leveled directly at our record keeping. i was astounded by the weakness of reasoning. i can't tell whether they put more effort into the assignments or the lies. like, even a conciliatory "sorry, i dropped my computer in an aquarium and had to ship it away for repairs and then i couldn't change my account password so it expired and i couldn't use any other computer and i'm also allergic to pixels they give me an eye rash" would be more reasonable. i don't write this to mean "lie better" though; just if you're going to put in effort, distribute it through the semester onto the things that actually matter.
they probably still passed, but with only the distinction of being the subject of the story i will tell in the first staff meeting this year.
i also have a good amount of stories from other jobs, definitely not all venting like this one, but i have to sanitize them a little more closely
