If you don’t like your grade, go above your professor directly to the dean and complain.
It worked at Texas Tech University until last week, when a faculty panel released a “damning report” on the dean of the business school, Lance Nail, creating a separate test system for students who otherwise would have failed, Inside Higher Ed reports.
It started to unravel when math professor Jay Conover noticed three of his students at graduation who shouldn’t have been able to get their MBAs based on the grades he gave them:
The dean got another professor (who didn’t know why he was asked to do so) to create an alternative exam for Conover’s course. Then the dean let five students take the alternative exam, and on that basis, raised the grades of four of the students … This process violated multiple rules at Texas Tech, the report concluded.
Nail is resigning as dean at the end of the calendar year while remaining a tenured finance professor. The sin wasn’t changing grades per se, but circumventing the protocols for considering appeals:
[B]ased on the report, it appears the students convinced Nail that Conover’s grades were somehow unfair. …
But as the report notes, even if the dean or the students had reason to doubt the grades, they needed to follow an appeals process before any grades could be changed. Such a process would have, among other things, involved Conover. Texas Tech, like most colleges and universities, sets a very high bar for changing grades a faculty member has assigned.
Nail is quoted by the committee as saying that “no college grade appeals committee” could have convinced him that the grades were fair. But the panel rejected this argument. “This logic is premised on the assumption that nothing could be gleaned from an appeals board review, that only the student side of things was heard/valued and that Dr. Conover could offer nothing in his own ‘defense’ since he was left completely outside” the process Nail created to evaluate the students and assign them new grades.
It’s not clear whether Texas Tech will (or even can) rescind the MBAs from the four students who have graduated since Nail changed their grades. A spokesman said the school has “begun to review” those students and others from Conover’s class, “in order to treat all students in a fair and consistent manner and meet our academic standards.”
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