Professors can always change the syllabus at any time 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
Sincerely,
Someone who’s had that problem
What exactly are your dissection days now? We dissected every single lab period...are you guys specifically not dissecting on certain days for some reason?
I can't say I'm against withholding points from people who don't go, especially if you're group may be catching up on dissection without you realizing it. I can almost guarantee you this is being done as a response to some classmates complaining about groupmates' absences (or because the TAs/instructors are noticing certain people aren't coming).
For using the syllabus, it states the following: Although attendance will not be taken, students are expected to attend all scheduled lectures, laboratories, and discussions. Poor attendance generally results in poor grades. If a student should happen to be late to class, it is expected that the student will NOT disturb the rest of the class when arriving. Laboratory evaluation points (midterm and final), 5%. (we didn't have any at midterm)
There's nothing about how those points are graded specifically in the syllabus; that's been established by the individual teaching anatomy that quarter. In the past, it's been that the instructors pick 10 important structures between our two dogs and our large animal and grade that we found the structure and cleared it to where it would be usable for an exam. With us not really dissecting this quarter and having a new professor, it's been up in the air so to speak. In the first lecture, it was said that dissection points would be free points as long as everyone 1) participated in the limited dissection (explained below) and 2) didn't mess up the demo schedule (also explained below). Now it's 1) people who haven't been in lab don't get points and 2) there will 30 structures that each group pins on a cadavar (as a group) that another group will then grade.
Now, I'd be fine with all of that. I'd even be fine with the update of the group pin situation being this week. But we haven't had any real dissection until the most recent Wednesday. For repro we had one bit of dissection because of the formalin level problem. They made isolated tracks of pretty much everything and set up a demo rotation with assigned groups (not our dissection groups) would go from TA to TA in groups of 10-15 or do self-study. She specifically stated the very first lecture we were not required to go to demos or lab during those times. I kept up-to-date with my lab group to make sure I didn't miss an impromptu dissections that weren't in the schedule. We had one bit of dissection on one dog that I finished up later on for the group.
We just had our first head dissection on Wednesday, which continued into today. Otherwise, it's been entire self study during lab with all 135 of us in there. We also only have 1 hour of actual class time in the anatomy lab for the majority of this quarter. Most days, it's 2 hours of lecture and 1 hour of labs. Then that hour of lab has a demo that's between 20-40 minutes.
Normally, I would 100% agree that someone not showing up and not pulling their weight doesn't deserve to have the points. But that's not the case cause we haven't had any real dissection; it's been 95% group/self-study. I've pulled my weight when we've had actual group stuff going on. I just can't do the self-study thing when there's 135 people in there and not a ton of cadavars or prosections to go around without having everyone elbow to elbow talking over each other. And demos on one prosection with 15 classmates huddled around it is a hard nope for me.
To be honest, I also don't necessarily see this coming from the class or the TAs. I went in to talk to someone about it for a few minutes and most of the anatomy staff were not included in the email and did not know about it until this morning when students asked about it. I was also told that groups having problems with people not pulling their weight had been dealt with on a case-by-case basis through out the year and not via emails to the class in general.
Overall, I don't think those of us who don't come should be punished when we were literally told that it was okay to not be there when there's nothing group orientated happening. Like I said, it's goalpost changing.
Did you ever hear about the second year lab practical disaster my class had to deal with? We were told it was open note for 6 weeks (and historically has always been open note), and days before the exam (when everyone has made beautiful guides for the practical and has done no wrote memorization whatsoever) he decided it would be closed note. lol. good times.
I'm proud of y'all not dying from caffeine overdoses. That would've sent 2020 into freaking blood lust frenzy...
