Poll of the Day > Have you ever had a teacher that you felt was trying to fail students

(+) Yeah! (+)

And they enjoyed it? In my experience it seems that teachers hate giving bad grades.
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well yeah, if everyone in a class is failing that reflects much more on the teacher than the students
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Yep
When i was in grade 9, there was a teacher, if she hated you she would fail you.
Proof, she failed one of my brothers friends, but in HS (10-12) he was in AP History. She was social studies/history teacher.

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My 7th grade science teacher threw all of my homework into the trash so that she didnt have to give out bad grades to everyone else because I was scoring 100% perfect grades and she wanted to grade on a curve. I didnt figure out what happened the first semester, because why assume the teacher is screwing you over, and turned in every single assignment in the second semester by shoving it in her face before placing it in the box. Then she claimed I turned in nothing again, only this time I found my entire folder sitting in the trash behind her desk. The third semester for some reason I cant fathom I assumed she wasnt about to do it again but low and behold I didnt turn anything in again and this time I couldnt find my folder in the trash or in the dumpster out back. I got a C in that class and I never did homework again all the way through high school because I learned there wasnt any point to do it.

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Ogurisama posted...

Proof, she failed one of my brothers friends, but in HS (10-12) he was in AP History. She was social studies/history teacher.

It's always those ones who are incompetent and unfair, especially here in Canada.
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Had 3 in high school that were so bad, the principal had to intervene because of the complaints from parents due to the issues with grades

One French teacher HATED guys. She would mark our answers wrong without even looking at them. I went from a 95 average with the prior teacher to a 60. Every guy (and only guys) were failing. It was obvious. Parents got involved and things were fixed.

11th grade English teacher failed kids she didn't like. Freely admitted it. Not a good thing to do, especially around little ears that may hear and tell everyone. Of course they did!

7th grade Spanish teacher who wanted ridiculous amount of work done. Failed entire classes and thought it was great. My class of 28 only had 25 pass. Another had a full 30 of 30 fail. He just laughed and laughed at everyone who failed. He eventually relented a little on the work. By then it was too late for most

jesus
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aDirtyShisno posted...

My 7th grade science teacher threw all of my homework into the trash so that she didnt have to give out bad grades to everyone else because I was scoring 100% perfect grades and she wanted to grade on a curve. I didnt figure out what happened the first semester, because why assume the teacher is screwing you over, and turned in every single assignment in the second semester by shoving it in her face before placing it in the box. Then she claimed I turned in nothing again, only this time I found my entire folder sitting in the trash behind her desk. The third semester for some reason I cant fathom I assumed she wasnt about to do it again but low and behold I didnt turn anything in again and this time I couldnt find my folder in the trash or in the dumpster out back. I got a C in that class and I never did homework again all the way through high school because I learned there wasnt any point to do it.

Wtf
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rexcrk posted...

Wtf

Yup.

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Definitely

Our electrical engineering program had a "weed out" class in sophomore year, Linear Circuit Threory.
An older student warned me about it in advance, saying that the professor would get the mid-term in before the drop out deadline to give everyone their current standings and what they'd need to pass the class on the remaining tests. He said half the class would opt to drop out right then, and half of those who stayed would go on to fail.
He predicted it correctly (I opted to drop out along w/ 1/2 the class, and 1/2 that stayed failed).
The professor would give exams that'd take an hour but only had 4 problems, working out values for resistors, current, etc... for complex circuits. If you got the wrong answer, he did not give partial credit, b/c "if you had double checked your work, you would've noticed your error," and usually it boiled down to not doing all the problems and trying to focus on just 2-3 of them and make sure you get them completed, b/c incomplete was the same as never even bothering, and you needed to manage your time. He'd sit behind us while we struggled and panicked, with a sadistic smile.

Most people went to the community college during summer break to take a much easier version of the class and transfer the credits over. Or in a lot of cases...decided to drop the engineering major completely and do something easier.
I re-enrolled the next semester and scraped by w/ a C. I wonder how many actually passed that damn class on the first try....

streamofthesky posted...

If you got the wrong answer, he did not give partial credit

wow never had a teacher that didn't give partial credit for a test that was not multiple choice. i am a third year comp sci major and the class i am taking right now is kind of a weed out class. it has to do with programming languages. the next class is operating systems, which i heard is a class that makes comp sci majors change to IT or just drop out of anything related to comp sci.
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magemaximus posted...

streamofthesky posted...

If you got the wrong answer, he did not give partial credit

wow never had a teacher that didn't give partial credit for a test that was not multiple choice.

He did grade on a curve. So getting two fully right was basically a C, and 3 right was a B I think.
But it was so fucking frustrating to spend 15-20 min on a problem out of your hour, mess something up, and get no credit for it just the same as if you never even attempted it.
Such a brutal and stupid grading method...
So yeah, we learned quick that it was better to just find the easiest problems and focus on those. Of course, he also liked to trick us w/ "red herrings" that looked simpler on first glance than they actually were.
lol

streamofthesky posted...

magemaximus posted...

streamofthesky posted...

If you got the wrong answer, he did not give partial credit

wow never had a teacher that didn't give partial credit for a test that was not multiple choice.

He did grade on a curve. So getting two fully right was basically a C, and 3 right was a B I think.
But it was so fucking frustrating to spend 15-20 min on a problem out of your hour, mess something up, and get no credit for it just the same as if you never even attempted it.
Such a brutal and stupid grading method...
So yeah, we learned quick that it was better to just find the easiest problems and focus on those. Of course, he also liked to trick us w/ "red herrings" that looked simpler on first glance than they actually were.
lol

My wife went to nursing school to be an RN and she had one written test every week, a paper and clinicals. If you got below an 80 on the written test, automatic failure and had to n start the semester over again. Under an 80n on the paper, same thing. Maken one mistake on clinical (no matter how small), you failed. The clinicals could be an hour or more

They didn't believe in partial credit either. There's a reason why the class of ~150 finished with 12

Teachers like yours and hers are on a power trip. There is no reason to make things that difficult or stressful

streamofthesky posted...

Our electrical engineering program had a "weed out" class in sophomore year, Linear Circuit Threory.

That reminds me of one college history professor that I had. He was horribly racist and made sure to let everyone know of the superiority of the Afrikaans peoples as well as flaunt that almost nobody passed his classes, letting us know that his entire class failed the previous semester. He had the weirdest way of grading peoples papers because he would have students swap papers and grade each others and then hed grade them himself and finally hed average the two together.

Logically if everyone graded everybody with an A then the worst everyone could get would be a C average on everything, but everyone was ruthless because they knew that half the class had to fail or everyone would fail! Because of this people were grading low for minor errors like poor spelling and grammar, which shouldnt even be considered in a history class. Procedure was also super important to the professor so if the correct procedure wasnt followed then the grade would be an automatic F.

During one written exam we were divided up into groups of 4 and had 4 different topics that we had to write about, one of which the professor completely ignored in class and said the day before the exam that we didnt have time to learn about it and would just have to study it on our own, cramming for the exam the next day.

The four of us had to divide up the topics amongst ourselves and everyone could only do one. I let the group know that I absolutely knew Topic A 100%, but that I only Topic B around 50%, with Topic C around 25%, and naturally Topic D I knew close to 0%.

Student 1 made herself our leader and said she knew all 4 topics 100%. Student 2 said he only knew Topic B 100% and the rest 0%. Student 3 said he only Topic C 100% and the rest 0%.

I said that was perfect and with Student 1 doing Topic D and myself doing Topic A wed have 4 excellent papers. But our leader wasnt having it. She was adamant that she was going to do Topic A because it was her favorite and that she was going to give it 110%. No matter what I said she wouldnt let me do anything except Topic D so I told them I would not participate.

She freaked out and thought they would all fail if I didnt submit a paper. I explained that according to the rules each paper must be graded by a student and each student could only grade one paper. Logically Student 1 could grade Student 2s paper, Student 2 could grade Student 3s paper, and Student 3 could grade Student 1s paper and theyd still be following the rules. She still freaked out and complained to the professor who told me just to submit a blank paper with my name on it.

I did one better.

I wrote a paper explaining exactly what had transpired in our group and why I could not write an essay on the 4th topic. Student 1 graded my paper with an F. The professor gave me an A, so I averaged a C.

I passed that class.

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I've had at least one teacher that was harder on me personally, but as far as I know that was isolated and not a matter of teaching style in general.

I did have one teacher outright say his course load was deliberately designed to be excessive. The smart kids eventually just took the hit to their grades and stopped doing his assignments. Even other teachers complained to him about this.
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Yeah. One was a French teacher. He just liked failing students.

Another was a history teacher. I was getting bad grades in his class. I told my mom he just didnt like me and wanted to fail me. She didnt know what to think, so she helped me out. She helped me with a few projects and stuff, and all of them got failing grades. She said he could have at least given me Cs. After that, she said fuck the class, then. I probably should have switched, but I didnt want to. In the end, I failed and had to go to summer school. When I went, there were multiple students from my school there who had him, as well...
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I sort of had the opposite. My grade 12 social studies teacher liked to say that he had never failed a student, so if you were doing poorly he would get *very* angry about it. He would go through everyone's homework with them at their desk and embarrass anyone (me) who didn't do all of it. (I hadn't been in a classroom since I was 12 years old so it was a pretty rough experience for me.)

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I had an English teacher my junior year of high school who was known for the difficulty of her class. She still did spelling tests, which was nice because it was kind of an easy way to prop up our grade. She was hardcore on the literature though. We would get a book to read over the course of a few weeks and a huge packet to go with it. I remember The Crucible having like a 28 page packet. A few of the answers would be straightforward but the vast majority was "read between the lines really hard" type stuff. We often had random assignments that would be worth like 10 points, I'm pretty sure the spelling tests were either that or 20. Everything was dink and dunk, but by the end, our grand total was out of like 2700. It was crazy. I did scrape out a low B but it was by far the most work I ever had to put into an "English" class.

I had an intro to computers teacher that gave entirely random participation grades. Guy was full of himself too, he would spend half the class bragging about how much a different college was paying him to teach there. The girlfriend I had at the time, we both had the exact same attendance and exact same participation level. She ended up with 90/100, I got 10/100.

Then I had a history class where there were basically two tests and 2-3 quizzes for the entire grade of the semester, an entire 100 points available. We would have to read 80+ pages per week and from my memory, the quizzes would cover the most obscure items for the most part. I was always the type to take extra note of anything hold, with a headline, etc... Had a few Middle Eastern students and I knew it was bad when they were struggling. I'm pretty sure on the first two quizzes I totaled like 7/20, and I didn't even go to the final because after doing the math, I needed like 96% on that just to avoid outright getting an 'F'. This was intro to history.
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half of your guys' stories are straight up unethical dude
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