Can You Reopen the Exam for Me?

I admire the urgency, discipline, and teamwork of ant colonies. Press a stick into the side of a nondescript mount of clay, and within two seconds the mound is covered with ants moving with purpose. It looks chaotic—ants going in every direction and climbing on top of each other—sort of like this:

 

I don’t upset ant colonies intentionally. Well, not always. Sometimes they’re impossible to avoid with the lawn mower. But within a few hours or days the hole is gone and its just a sleepy nondescript mound again.

 

The same kind of urgent scurrying occurs with students whenever I update my grade books. That’s when those who missed a deadline receive their zeroes. Before the zeroes appear, I imagine that students are living in blissful ignorance of their mistakes. Updating their grade is like jamming a stick into their calm world. 

 

Students have to receive some kind of notification when I do this, because their reaction is immediate and forceful. Their urgency makes me think their phone must wail like a local child has been kidnapped. That’s when the apologetic emails come pouring in.

 

It always happens, especially in first-year courses when students haven’t had the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. It happened just now after updating my grade book earlier this morning. I didn’t want to do it, because I wasn’t prepared for the deluge of anxiety. I need to be in a calm headspace. It’s best if I’ve had a good ten hours of sleep and a productive morning. But today I was feeling kind of tired and lazy. I decided that I could make it like ripping off the bandage—painful but brief. I still don’t know why I did it. Bandages usually fall off naturally after a few days.

 

The first excuse arrived. “I was really busy last night , and the deadline slipped my mind,” she said. She must have been busy for a lot longer than that, because the deadline was last week.

 

Over the years, I’ve experimented with how and when to let students know about their missed quizzes and exams. After being fair and just, my goal is to limit the psychological aftershocks on my end. The LMS can be programmed to give students a 0 immediately, so the most obvious solution is to do that. If an exam closes at 11:59pm, then students will automatically receive an email at 12:00am. In this case, I receive an email at approximately 12:09am detailing how or why the mistake was made. In this automated format, the excuse is validated by temporal proximity. I can almost imagine students with beads of sweat on their foreheads as they’re desparately trying to connect to their parents’ WIFI before the deadline passes.

 

Of course, a better excuse would come hours before the deadline. 

 

For a good while, I waited until official grades were due to update the books. Come midterm time, I’d go through the books and add in the zeroes all at once. That way I could consolidate the frenzied pleas for extra time to a single block. Later, I tried to divert the waterfall of appeals by sending a preliminary email as a sort of warning, but I still received the same, “I didn’tt realize it was due on a Thursday , how strange ?” emails.

 

The best solution—aftershock-wise—is to update the grades after the term has ended. That way there’s officially nothing I can do. But that led to me unofficially spending the evening before commencement reopening exams and assignments, sending reminders, and so on. What can I say? I’m a pushover.

 

No matter how I do it, I feel like I’m playing a nasty trick on my students. That’s why I’m constantly double- and triple-checking deadlines, notifications, email reminders, and consistency in deadlines across the LMS, syllabus, introduction videos, and so on. If there is one bit of misleading information in the whole mass, then I’m the one at fault and students should be exonerated.

 

It’s obviously my fault when I step on the corner of an anthill. The ants don’t know it—at least I don’t think they do—but their world has just been altered by a being who is bigger and more powerful than they can understand. I worry that that’s the way it is in the classroom, too. But students are a lot more powerful than ants, and that’s saying something. Have you ever accidentally stood on a fire ant hill?