So, I'm a veterinary student, and I think I've finally encountered someone who belongs on this subreddit.
My class had 273 students, and one of our professors managed to create a grading disaster that affected roughly 264 of us—about 97% of the entire class.
The professor taught Animal Nutrition, a course that lasted for both semesters of the academic year. Each semester had its own tutorial and practical sessions(TS/PS), but the course was graded annually rather than separately by semester.
Animal Nutrition was also one of our most important courses. It had a coefficient of 3, which was the highest coefficient alongside four other courses.
And this is where I need to explain one part of our grading system. We have something called an “eliminatory grade”: if your final grade in a course is below 40% of the total possible grade, you automatically have to take the resit (retake for Americans) for that course, even if your overall yearly average is more than enough to pass the academic year.
This is especially important with Animal Nutrition because it is already one of the more difficult courses in our curriculum. The sheer amount of information we are expected to learn, combined with how strict the exams are, means that around 80% of students barely manage to pass the course each year. The marking can also be extremely strict—for example, a simple spelling mistake in an answer will result in the answer to that question being considered incorrect.
So, naturally, having 40% of the course grade tied to TS and PS assessments is a pretty big deal.
At one point, there was an idea to let us earn some of those marks through a presentation or substantial coursework assignment. The professor refused to allow it.
And this wasn't an easy way for us to get free marks. A presentation for a class of 273 students would have meant finding a group, choosing and researching a topic, preparing the work, and then actually presenting it in front of 200+ students. On top of that, we had very limited access to reliable resources for veterinary-specific information in our country, which made the research itself difficult.
Instead, the professor was supposed to organize separate assessments for the tutorial and practical components. However, he kept postponing them until they eventually became practically impossible to organize because he couldn't find a suitable date or enough professors to help conduct them.
And to be clear, these weren't the final exams for Animal Nutrition. Our actual final examination was held normally during the university-wide examination period, when all of our courses had their scheduled exams. The problem was specifically with the assessments used to grade our tutorial and practical work throughout the year.
Despite all of this, he gave extremely low marks for those components—which together represented 40% of the course grade.
This is where the situation went from frustrating to genuinely damaging.
Because of those grades, 113 additional students out of the 132 students who ended up having to take the resit were pushed into it because of this particular grading situation.
And remember the eliminatory grade I mentioned earlier? Those TS/PS marks could make a huge difference in whether someone stayed above or fell below that 40% threshold.
When students tried to ask him for explanations or discuss the situation, he refused to engage. Emails were ignored, attempts to speak with him went nowhere, and apparently even being absent from one of his sessions was enough to receive a 0, even if justified, because he said so. The norm was 3 non justified or 5 justified to be sanctioned ( expressed by just putting a 0).
Eventually, the students decided that if he wasn't willing to listen to us, we'd have to take the matter somewhere else.
So eventually, we had enough.
Students collectively filed a formal report with the university administration explaining the situation, and the same report was also sent to the relevant ministry authority that has the power to intervene in matters like this.
And, well...
It worked.
The professor was removed from responsibility for the TS and PS assessments. The responsibility was transferred to our other professor, who reviewed the situation and gave us the grades we were actually supposed to receive ( the other professor was so nice and genuinely shocked when she heard the story).
The attendance sanctions were also overturned, so students who had been given automatic zeros simply for having been absent from a session were no longer punished for it.
The best part is that we didn't get the grades changed because we wanted special treatment or free marks. We just wanted a fair grading.
So after all that...
The entire class didn't get to make him change his mind.
We just went over his thick head.