Going back to school.

[budhak0n]

Ok I'm back taking Prereq's right now and I know I've said this before and a couple of people have sort of pushed it aside, but this is definitely something I'm going to have to deal with, but hey it's not like I've never dealt with it before... but hey you guys are the ones who supposedly have been through this before.

Ok what do you do when you're in a science class with a professor who keeps marking things wrong on assignments that were done correctly?

I still have an A so it hasn't become an issue, but I can definitely see this possibly becoming a problem....

For instance, on a lab involving Biocalculations a question was asked to write a mathematical formula for determining how many days food supply you have left for a pet who eats a certain amount of food per day ( In fact I distinctly remember dealing with this with an Econ Prof way back when)..

Ok so I write the Right equation...

B= total of food supply you start with..

A= the daily intake of food...

And it's a real simple equation...

B-xA/A... that's your equation where x is the number of days.. this guy marks it wrong and says it's B/A.. when I point it out to him that his equation doesn't even take into consideration that fact that you have to feed the dog THAT day and I didn't do it in an argumentative fashion or say things like you're wrong blah blah blah... I tried to go slowly and explain to him how the equation works... he didn't get it ...

This guy didn't even get the equation when I explained it to him.

Now as long as this course works out fine and I get an A in it me and him will be fine... but something about this just scares me just a little bit.

LOL

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[budhak0n]

This is also the guy who when I couldn't have been nicer said things to me like make sure you know when the latest day you can withdraw and get a refund........... LOL

Come on ... I know people are just wacko some more than others at the undergrad level ... but some of this is just k00 k00 ... lol

 

[2008orbust]

Smile, act like you are not taking anything he does personally, move on and don't ask him for a LOR.

 

[Nauss99]

I've had similar experiences with professors who like the open-ended "design your own experiment" type of question. It helps to describe the process or equation and then have a concrete example with numbers to show that the calculations work. There is no accounting for general crazyness but the example usually helps show the grader that what you did actually could work if they can't figure it out from the description alone.

Leave nothing up to the grader's imagination, especially if their's is "very active" (they're nuts).

This is also the guy who when I couldn't have been nicer said things to me like make sure you know when the latest day you can withdraw and get a refund........... LOL

Come on ... I know people are just wacko some more than others at the undergrad level ... but some of this is just k00 k00 ... lol

 

[Non-TradTulsa]

This guy didn't even get the equation when I explained it to him.

Well, not to be argumentative, but if you used a formula of B/A, it would be correct if you assumed that the "days left of food" included today.

You're assuming that there is an "absolute" correct answer. You need to pick up on the subtleties of how he's teaching. If he expects less complex answers, then you should pick-up on the fact that he's probably going to prefer "B/A" over "(B-xA)/A."

The point here is, you need to give back what the instructor is teaching, not what you think the most correct answer is. If you don't, you'll run into similar problems in medical school. My neuroscience final almost drove me batty - because I had four different lecturers all talking about the higher functions of the brain, and none of them were in exact agreement about what the insula, cingulate gyrus, and prefrontal cortex did (granted, they were pretty close, but not exact). Now, could you tell three of the four that they're wrong? No, you wouldn't get very far that way - because all four were brain function researchers and they all taught based on the results of their own research. When you get to the frontiers of medical knowledge, none of them are "wrong" because there are no absolute answers - yet. You can't tell them they're "wrong." What I had to do was, remember what each instructor taught and answer his questions on the test according to what he taught. (Now, on board exams, where there has to be one answer - they wouldn't ask anything as detailed as what was on that final exam.)

An expression you may hear in medical school is "Cooperation=Graduation." That's how the game is played. Good luck.

 

[SunshineNYC]

I think you should make sure you are 100% correct and then talk to the department head about it. Though, if you already have an A anyway, maybe let it be, but if his mistakes starts to hurt your grades, then go talk to the department head and get your grade changed to what it should be.