Handling grade disputes in grad school

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I'm a rising second-year PhD student at a big state university in the US. I'm seeking advice regarding the possibility of disputing a grade received this past semester in one of my core PhD courses. Here's the background:

The course involved is one of the pre-qualifying exam courses we're expected to take prior to taking the qualifying exam in August. The professor who taught the course is a full professor in the department and one of its lead researchers. However, his teaching record is atrocious. He receives complaints from students pretty much every semester. This largely has to do with the fact that he doesn't like to teach (as he actually told us in class multiple times). He doesn't prepare lectures (because it takes too much work, as he's told us), so typical lectures are just him scribbling random things on the board, then consulting the textbook when (not if) he gets confused. We have no idea what he's even covering in class most of the time because he never says what section of the book he's covering or even what the topic is. Worse, the subject he had to teach us this semester wasn't even his field. He said the department threw the course on him because it was his turn.

The real problem I have, however, is the grading scheme. In his original syllabus, he stated grades would consist of regular homework, a project, a midterm, and an in-class final. However, this wasn't followed at all. We had no homework the whole semester. The project was changed last minute to a one page summary of a section from the book because he didn't bring the topic up until the last class before the final (and he went out of his way to say not more than one page and not to put much effort into it). The midterm turned into a take home exam that consisted of problems assigned from the book (where those problems were determined literally by drawing numbers out of a hat, and we all had different problems often of substantially varying difficulty). The final exam was changed to a take-home exam last minute as well, and consisted of problems that he made up out of his own head (he admitted this). We never received a single graded assignment back once in the course. He also admitted he hadn't graded the midterm yet when he gave us the take-home final.

As frustrating as this is, (especially given this is a qualifier prep class and hence we should really know the material well) neither I nor the other students (around 7 in the class total) said anything to anyone during the semester because our understanding was that we'd all likely receive roughly the same grades anyway in both the class and on the qualifier. However, at the end of the semester this didn't happen. Two got an A, 4 got a B+, and 1 got a B (the B being me).

Now, to me, getting a B in a grad-level class looks really bad, like getting a C or a D in an undergrad class. But what really erks me about it is that based on extensive conversations with others in the course and comparing answers on exams afterwards is that it doesn't appear as of yet that these grades were assigned based on course content at all, but on some other (perhaps even arbitrary) metric (which this professor has been accused of in the past multiple times). I contacted the professor to talk about this, but he brushed me off and said to talk to him about it in a few months when he's back in town.

This leaves me with a real dilemma. What should I do now? Do I just suck it up and let the dispute go? This is a full professor, after all, and he is the one making the qualifying exam in that subject. But on the other hand, I have a very strong reason at this point to believe that something is amiss, and that myself and others are victims of an arbitrary (perhaps even discriminatory) grading scheme. Should we stand for this on principle?

Now, I'm not the type of person who's complained every time I've gotten a bad grade. Usually I know it was my fault and just suck it up and do better next time. But this time really feels different. However, this is obviously complicated by the delicate political situation of grad student vs full professor.

I want to bring this up first with the graduate director. He's a reasonable man who's helped with things like this before with others. But before I did that I wanted to seek advice from you all to see whether this is worth pursuing, and if so, what myself and others in the course should do about this. Thanks for reading this long-winded rant.

manpreet 2 years ago