How the might do fall. It was at my last posting that I mentioned I had made the Dean's list. On my very next class it appears that all hell has broken loose.

I have been mostly absent from here lately due to some pressing affairs at home, and they were keeping me quite busy. During my MGT 330 Management of Organizations class I started to slip a little. In the first week I did not get my work due on Thursday turned in until Sunday. As a result I received half credit getting only 3.5 points instead of 7 (out of 8 possible) for the work. The next week I was even later, and turned in my Thursday work on Monday, the last day of the week. While I completed the tasks I did not participate in online conversation, and did not give others the opportunity to respond to my own work, so I received no points, 0 (out of 8 possible). At this point I realized I really needed to pick myself up by the bootstraps. I had already missed 12.5 possible points of the 100 available for the class. I wrote to the professor and inquired about extra credit (in a cleverly written note entitled "grade grubbing" and was simply told that none was available. Realizing I had made a rather sloppy bed I prepared to sleep in it. I dedicated myself to making damn sure I still got a B in the class.

Well, on the last day of class I left work early and went to library to finish my final paper. Turns out that the library was closed for President's Day, so I went home to bull through it there. I kept at it all through the evening and into the night, writing and rewriting and editing to make sure I turned in an excellent paper. I was sitting on 59 points, with 25 available for the final paper I could still get an 84 for the class (I had missed a couple of stray points on what I through were rather ambiguous quiz questions, but that is another story). So I am diligently working on the paper when I notice that it is 2:45 AM. I decide to go over the formatting of my citations before I save and submit the paper. As I was polishing that formatting I was still making some grammatical and edits and tweaks to the phrasing to make the flow feel good. Looking up I noticed that it was 3:07! The deadline for the class was 2:59 (11:59 pacific time). So I saved and submitted and went to sleep.

The next week I checked every day to see when my grade was posted, and the fact that there was a 0 for the score did not bother me too much as there was no score in the "average grade for the class" section. By the weekend the average grade for the class was up to 9.48, and I was still showing a zero, so I decided it was time to write to the professor. Sure enough she gave me a zero because my paper was timestamped Tuesday, which means it missed the deadline.

This really sucks. More than the grade, I need a C in the class to be reimbursed by work. The tuition for this course is $990, and the book was around $110. So the zero on the final paper might end up costing me $1100 dollars. The REALLY sucks. What is even more aggravating is that enforcement of deadlines is at the discretion of the instructor, so she could just as easily choose to give me full credit for the paper (or any credit for the paper), but she chooses to give me a zero. To further salt the wound, this week the average grade for the class has risen from 9.48 to 11, which means she is changing SOMEBODY's grade.

Needless to day I am appealing this with the proper authorities at the school. I am very hopeful that I am going to get at least 11 points for the paper in the end. I would still like to get 21 or more and see a B for the class. I can understand the points missing when I essentially missed class (as much as you can in an all online format), but the zero on the final paper for missing the deadline by just a few minutes, that is just rude.

So after some rather well written appeals to the school I saw today in my current class a posting of the school's policy for late submissions. It turns out that the school accepts papers up to three days late, but each day late constitutes a 10% penalty on the grade. So with that knowledge I am confident that my paper will be graded. I just hope I didn't say something along the lines that makes her give me 12 points on the paper, then deduct 10% leaving me 0.2 points short of reimbursement. Then I might understand why people go postal.

I'll update when I have news.

Bill