Professor Problems

        The University of Guelph have given me many accommodations, but even this can cause problems of its own. They allowed me to move the time of my history exam to the late afternoon so I could sleep in as much as I needed. When I sat down and looked at the exam I realized I couldn't differentiate between the history knowledge I had beforehand and the new lessons learned from the class. If I was writing with the class where the professor was present I would have asked for guidance on how to approach the questions which required me to explain the significance and meaning of a bunch of history terms. My previous experiences in that class involved me losing marks for having a technically correct answer but one without relating it back to the class lectures. I wasn't sure if I should simply write everything I knew about the different topics or if I should really just do my best to articulate what we learned in class. I chose to write everything I knew on each topic. As I would later find out, this was the wrong decision.

      At the end of that semester I had an 80 in my politics class and a 79 in the history one. If you have an average of 80+ you make the dean's list. I went to see the history professor during office hours to see if there were any marks I could argue for to bump up my average. As soon as I walked in the door I realized she was quite angry with me. She immediately said there would be no negotiations. She explained she took a lot of marks away from my answers for writing too much. She was offended because in her view I had abused the extra time Student Accessibility Services (SAS) gave me. I hadn't thought of it that way at all, I just wasn't sure what to do and couldn't ask the professor for direction. I see her point though, so I apologized and she said I'm a great and engaged student and that she hopes to see me in her future classes. The SAS accommodations were to supposed to help me but due to my mistake it actually hindered me on this exam.

   In the next semester I also ran afoul of a different history professor. My quality of sleep seems to follow a pattern of alternating days. I sleep in and feel great but then have trouble sleeping that night so the next day I feel super crappy all day and have an easy time falling asleep and then sleep in again to feel better. I mention this because it turned out my 2 exams were booked in 2 consecutive days. I brought the exam change request form to my professor and he gave his signature but left the date blank. I thought that meant I can select the date myself as long as it's before the exam deadline. This was done months in advance of the final exam. A few days before the exam date, the SAS people asked my professor for a copy of the exam which they will then give to me to write. When my professor saw the date I chose he told SAS that he never agreed to that date and then cancelled my exam booking. For some reason he thought I had just recently filled out the form and so told me this has to be done 3 weeks in advance. I did it months in advance, he's the one who cancelled it! I needed that booking so SAS talked to him and explained what actually happened. He then said he never had any problem with me changing the date just that he needed to know because he didn't want to me to be able to cheat by asking my classmates what was on the exam. He needed to get a copy of an older exam to give to SAS. He was a jerk to me from the start of the semester, I think he wasn't convinced of my illness until my SAS adviser contacted him. I always have to wonder if maybe he saw me on my bike and so assumed I was faking. It wouldn't be the first time.

      If I was healthy then I wouldn't have written the exam without the professor being around and wouldn't have needed to change the date of my other exam. My illness indirectly screwed me over academically for my first year of university by putting me in situations where I can easily make mistakes. Many lessons have been learned regarding how to deal with professors and SAS staff. Some are as simple as checking ratemyproffesor, all the warning signs were there. I realized the only people who take this history of science course are the engineers who have to take it as a required credit. Literally about 95% of the class was engineers. This guy's exams caused several people to leave the midterm room crying within the first 10 minutes of the exam. Forcing engineers to write that many essays is cruel. His response was doing the exact same format as the final except with twice as much information. Who makes the entirety of a history exam essays? Literally the entire thing was essay questions. Fun times. I fare much better in my politics classes. I bonded with that professor over the fact we both have joint issues and we've spent hours talking politics outside class. I won't talk about his political beliefs but we see eye to eye on a lot of things. I just hope my sleep situation improves by the next semester because as of now the next politics class he's teaching is too early for me. I answered the vast majority of the questions in that class and so in the middle of the semester I asked if I should wait to raise my hand to give others a chance. He said it's fine and that I should keep raising whenever I have something to contribute. Funnily enough in the very last lecture when I raised my hand he half jokingly said to give others a chance and chose someone else. He asked for volunteers to play a game of exam review jeopardy. I was one of the first to raise my hand but he purposefully chose others. Unfortunately none of them knew the answer to the very first question so I ended up doing it anyway. It was a trick question, where is yadda yadda yadda in the constitution? The answer was it isn't in the constitution at all. We spent a crazy amount of time on exam review because the class average of the midterm was 49%. Interestingly, no one cried that time.