Allen’s personal comments
Academic Probation
Every Spring, usually around the 14th or 15th week, I get desperate email messages. Sometimes they come in at the end of Finals Week, after all the student work has been submitted:
HELP!!! I’m on academic probation and I absolutely NEED a “B” in this class or I will have to leave the school!!! What can I do to raise my grade???
The main problem with these desperate appeals is that they are about 12 weeks too late. By Week 14, all the papers have been written, the homework submitted, and the damage done, both in my course and in all your other courses. Here is my advice (and I am posting this in the second week of class because you need it now).
As I look at the grades and achievements of students who have received grades of C– or below during the last couple of years, most of them have three things in common:
- Most of them had a very poor attendance record—it was typical for them to miss more than 30% of the class meetings. Poor attendance meant that they missed basic instruction about how they were supposed to write their papers, and they didn’t receive their graded papers when everyone else did, so they had no clue why the previous paper got a poor grade when they sat down to write the next one. For a lot of these students, every paper was a shot in the dark.
- They would totally avoid peer editing sessions.
- Many of the papers arrived late.
If you know you are on academic probation, if you suspect you might be, or if you are simply worried about your grades:
- Analyze what is going on. You did not get on probation for doing poorly in just one class. Try to find a pattern, then seek appropriate help.
- Do all the good-student things. These are all within your ability. Go to bed on time. Stay sober. Attend every class session. Show up before the class starts and stay until the class ends. Stay awake during class. Do the reading. Take notes in class. Keep an assignment calendar. Submit every assignment, whether big or small, on time. Ask questions in class if you do not understand what you are supposed to do.
- Ask for help. The Writing Center is available to you. Use it! Ask questions in class! Come by during my office hours!
- Figure out how your course works. In our English course, you receive grades for the large papers, but you also get grades for reading quizzes, peer editing, and attendance, as well as four Writing Center visits, and four sentence combining sessions. If you are worried about academic probation, you really cannot toy with getting a zero in any of those categories!
- Absolutely avoid plagiarism. If your paper shows substantial, intentional plagiarism, your best hope is that I will give the paper a zero and let you stay in the course. If your course average was a solid B, that missing paper takes you to a C–.
- Don’t hope for extra credit. Most college teachers do not give extra credit assignments. I don’t. To raise a C minus to a B minus, you would need to submit a totally perfect 12-page extra credit paper. Arithmetic works against you. Are you going to throw together a totally perfect 12-page paper in a couple of days? I think not. Am I going to put out the effort to grade it? No, especially considering that all the other students would like a chance to throw together their 12-page papers.
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.
Revised 10/28/23 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.