archman:
I hate GIVING finals. All the bad students cry out how unfair the "system" is to them, and try every sleaze tactic in the modern U.S. to boost their grade. Hardly anyone cries about how disappointed their parents will be anymore, nor do they use the sympathetic "I'll lose my scholarship" line.
LOL. A friend of mine is teaching remedial math at a local community college, and I think it's going to drive her to drink. She says the next time she hears someone whine "Why didn't we go over questions like this in class???", she's going to take hostages, particularly when she did the exact problem on the test in class, asks for their notes, and they say they don't need to take them. I've seen these no-note takers in many of my classes and all but one of them (who was a genius) did abysmally.
At Davis (liberal, large school, which I love dearly), I did hear a lot of freshmen who had not yet recovered from high school complaining that their instructors weren't giving them a fair break because they didn't like them because of that one day they were talking in class/came in late... even as a freshman, I had to laugh at that. Three hundred students in a class and the instructor knows one person well enough to discriminate? Please.
archman:
Nowadays, its popular to use some variant of legal intimidation, or claim a vague social or medical condition, that of course they have no documentation for. Funny thing is, I never hear about this junk until THIS WEEK.
Some professors don't really help this though and can make life rough for other professors. I did well at Davis, but chemistry isn't my strong point, and organic chemistry was just killing me. I went to the instructor (early after the first midterm) to ask for help or tips because I was studying harder than I had for anything else, and it wasn't affecting my grade. She smiled sympathetically and said "Maybe you have a learning disability?", then directed me to the testing center (didn't go). Grrr.. Got a B in the class anyway. Found a super-smart guy willing to tutor me.
I think in the four years I was at Davis, I only saw one final exam that was truly unfair, and only because it was about an hour too long for our time block. Fortunately, the entire class had hideous trouble with it, so the curve evened it out, though left a lot of us really sweating for a few weeks.
So despite being a recent student, I sympathize.