Unknowledgable Instructors

*Warning: This is a rant. If you aren't in the mood to read a rant, find some other blog to read.

So, I'm in my last semester of college, with a 4.0 major GPA (in biology), and a 3.98 overall GPA. Basically, I have to royally screw up my grades this semester in order to not graduate summa cum laude.

Which is why having a professor that grades so arbitrarily frustrates me so much.

I'm taking a conservation biology class this semester, and our professor is making us write a paper and give oral presentation as a large percentage of our grade (together, they amount to 200 of 530 points). I was a little frustrated when I first heard of this, but quickly got over it cause I figured I'd have no trouble doing either, having done them many times before in my other classes.

Well, after working on them for something like 5 weeks, we got our papers back last week, and I was one of two people to give their presentations.

Now, our professor made this huge deal about not wanting to fail anyone, because it wasn't a core class, and so she gave no lower than a C on papers even if they deserved worse.

I got a B+. Now, after taking many English and History classes, and writing papers much longer and more complex than the one I wrote for her class, I have gotten nothing less than an A- on a paper before. What ticked me off more was that the students around me, dear friends of mine but not so good students, got A's.

Her reasoning was that I didn't do my reference page right (I did it exactly as the book said), I misused one word (depletion instead of reduction), I put the class and university instead of course number and instructor on the title page (the way I did it was how the sample title page was set up), and I accidentally put a comma in my first two in-text sources (which no one caught).

What's more is that according to her, an A is a 92%. The highest she gave anyone on their paper was a 95, and that was the sole person she said could 'write better' than she could.

After getting my presentation grade back, I got a 92. I followed every single one of the directions she gave, in an effort to make sure that she would have no reason to take off points. When I went in to talk to her, she said that she could barely hear me at the back of the room (and yet my friend, who sat in the back of the room as well, said I spoke very loudly and clearly), and I should have summarized my conclusion page better. Neither of which were requirements on her grading scale. She also said she never gives 100's out, and the highest grade she gave was a 98 to a graduate student who had streaming video and such in his presentation.

She said at the end of class that our presentations (the two of us who gave ours) were the best presentations she's seen.

All this probably wouldn't bug me as much as it does except for one thing. I went to talk to another one of my professors, mentioning that the class was being a pain because of her insistence on all this stuff, and he said... she can't write. Apparently she's only published 2 things that have had an editor, and nothing else has been reviewed. She thinks she can write so well because she got such hard training in college and is now an expert. That, and she reads a lot. Her presentations, I can say from first hand experience, completely suck. Wouldn't it be better to leave the instruction of such topics to people who actually know something about them?

She continues to stress that this is an upper division course, which I'm fine with. I'd be ok if it were graded difficultly and I thought it was fair. But her criteria for grading are completely non-existent. If she wants to mark off points because we didn't project well, then fine, but she needs to include that in the grading criteria she gives us.

It appears as though the only justice I'm going to get is when I do my review of her in about 20 minutes. Needless to say, it'll take quite some time for me to finish saying everything I want to say to this woman. And then, I'm going to talk to the department chair.