Investment Planning – Fall 2011

It has been a crazy week with finals and last minute projects! Sorry about the pause in posts, I have been enjoying my fellow bloggers post during my mini break though. Hello and welcome to all my new followers and subbies! Thanks for the support. I promise I will respond to all the comments ASAP!

 Now that the semester is finally over and my grades have been officially submitted I would like to share a story that is worth sharing about the Fall 2011 semester.

Usually I will not question a teacher’s grade on an exam, quiz, homework assignment, term paper, whatever. I just never do it. If there is an obvious error while we are going over a quiz and the professor made a mistake then I will say hey I got this right, fix it. But, this time I had to question because the grade was extremely low. I was forced to take this investment course online because my school decided to make any major courses available online only. Okay fine. My finance professor was probably the most careless professor I’ve seen in a long time. There were so many grammatical errors on homework assignments, so many misspelled words, information was missing on assignments, and last but not least exams weren’t available on time for deadlines. Like who does this? Did you ever hear of spell check? Like Microsoft products are available worldwide. Anyways, I want to pay closely attention to the issue that became an issue for me, which is in bold above, information missing on assignments. My school has twelve week quarters so I decided to take a look at the syllabus like most students during the first week of classes and noticed there was a research project that had to be completed by the 10^th week of classes. So I decided to complete my paper by the 8^th week because it was right around Thanksgiving and I wanted to be able to relax around the holiday. The research paper had the following guidelines:

PART #1

DESCRIBE YOUR TOPIC

CHARACTERISTICS, SCOPE,

ADVANTAGES/DISADVANTAGES, AND

HOW AND WHY YOUR TOPIC IS UTILIZED

IN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

PART # 2

SUMMARY (IN YOUR OWN WORDS)

SUMMARIZE YOUR TOPIC.  DESCRIBE

WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED FROM YOUR TOPIC

 

Now I am a smart kid and I read and read and reread the requirements numerous times and checked all over Blackboard to see if there was a page requirement and there was none. I decided to create my own page requirement and came up with the idea that 7 pages was good enough to submit. Well apparently not. I submitted the research paper early and I had to wait until the deadline which was no problem. So two weeks later I found out that I received a 50% as a grade on the paper. Now everyone knows the research paper is usually a good portion of your grade and I wasn’t happy with that. So I emailed the professor with emails that I sent to myself about the requirements and what the topics could have been for this assignment. The only thing that I made sure to point out were the dates of when the emails were sent and his exact text, again noted above. The email of the information above was sent Nov 14^th. However, on Nov 25^th the professor decided to add a few requirements one week before the paper was officially due.

Posted on: Friday, November 25, 2011

 

RESEARCH PROJECT GUIDELINES

PART #1

THE RESEARCH PAPER SHOULD BE BETWEEN 8-10 PAGES,

DOUBLE SPACED, INCLUDE A TABLE OF CONTENTS,

AND HAVE THE FOLLOWING:

DESCRIBE YOUR TOPIC

CHARACTERISTICS, SCOPE,

ADVANTAGES/DISADVANTAGES, AND

HOW AND WHY YOUR TOPIC IS UTILIZED

IN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

PART # 2

SUMMARY (IN YOUR OWN WORDS)

SUMMARIZE YOUR TOPIC.  DESCRIBE

WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED FROM YOUR TOPIC.

 

Now what do you kindly notice as the first requirement listed for this research paper: a page requirement. Mind you I have already submitted this assignment. Again I am a smart girl I do not do homework at the very last minute and I am pretty sure I can follow rules especially if they are spelled out clearly in front of me. So I asked the professor why would an A student purposely fail an assignment because of a page requirement that you failed to add to the guidelines. He sent me another email with these requirements. So now I am mad because CLEARLY again, I can read guy. So I sent him a nice email stating that we needed to be on the same page because he clearly wasn’t getting what I was trying to say. HUGE RISK. Yes I did say we need to be on the same page because I was upset. Needless to say I ended up getting a B+ on that paper because “there was a misunderstanding”.

The moral of the story is… do not allow a degree or a higher authority to stand in your way. If you know you are right and you have evidence to prove you are right, speak your peace. I ended up maintaining my A for my final grade and that grade for the research paper was my lowest. Sigh. I am happy that that class is over!!!