Grade climbers

Grade climbers are those students who are constantly trying to get you to give them a higher grade, even if they don't deserve it. Trying to get you to let them do "extra work" to get higher grades, telling you their stories of woe and scholarships desire to get you to give them higher grades. Doing anything at all to get higher grades.

I have only one such student at the moment, and boy will I be glad to see the back of her. I probably won't for awhile, though, because I'm sure she will want to challenge whatever grade she gets. You see, she wants an 85 and anything less won't do, but she isn't an A student in this class. At best she is actually a B+ with one A paper in her, but she won't be satisfied with that because she needs an 85% average to get the scholarship she wants for grad school.

She may be a better student in her other classes, which are mostly science classes. But in my class she isn't really equipped to pull off really high marks because it is not a science class. In my class she has to be self-reflexive, and she isn't particularly good at this. She's also not theoretically inclined, so that is another strike against her, furthermore she's not really a good critical thinker either. Basically she's a fish out of water and she shouldn't expect to be anything else; I wouldn't dare jump into a third year science course and know what the fuck I was doing to the point of getting an A!

She is also incredibly annoying. She emails me the same thing several hours apart if I don't respond IMMEDIATELY. I am good at responding to email, I usually get to it in 24 hours, but she expects me to respond in a couple of hours, with reams of new and exciting comments each time. She takes my comments and adds sentences to address them, which is totally inadequate. When I ask you to interrogate why science is the best way you see to "know" nature (and define nature in the process) a sentence doesn't cut it. I finally had to tell her today that this was my last email, after she emailed me the same thing FOUR times, at 11 p.m., 2 a.m., 11 p.m. and 2 p.m.! I had to see the midwife today and do some actual living, I am NOT at your beck and call. And students wonder why I don't give them my phone number! Christ woman, think for your damn self. And her paper sucks, she's not going to get an 85 and then she is going to come whining to me etc. etc.

This is one part of the job I really hate.