4% because of spelling mistakes....

[longhornbaseball]

Promisory estoppel? WRONG!!!! Completely, no points. Promissory estoppal and I get full credit.
Unconscienable? WRONG!!!!! Again, no points. Unconscionable and I get full credit.

As a sophomore in college you'd think I would be graded on knowledge of the content and not on spelling of the content but you would be wrong. The majority of the grades you receive in college are based on how much you study, work, etc, blah blah blah but a significant amount comes from the professor you have. I think that's awful. I'll never sign up for another class without first checking http://www.ratemyprofessors.com.

[cardinalkarp]

I'd be pretty pissed. I hated professors like that.

[Michael]

Last semester I got half credit on a test question because I answered .06 % instead of 6 %. I can understand if it were a math class but it wasn't.

[BenNX74205]

Promisory estoppel? WRONG!!!! Completely, no points. Promissory estoppal and I get full credit.

Not that it's worth the few points, but if you want ot really stick it to your professor the correct spelling is "promissory estoppel." If this prof wants to be a stickler for spelling, you should give it right back.

[Simbagal23]

That sucks. I could understand the prof at least pointing out the typos and advising you to be more careful, but not giving 0 points because of it. I had a cool prof at SIU-E for a marketing class, he advised us to NOT use spellcheck because it would mess our papers (too long to explain, but he had a certain format that he preferred, certain items in all CAPS, etc. and spell check would change it). I appreciated his warning because it really could have ruined my paper for his class....I always spellchecked until that particular class.

[cardinalkarp]

Promisory estoppel? WRONG!!!! Completely, no points. Promissory estoppal and I get full credit.

Not that it's worth the few points, but if you want ot really stick it to your professor the correct spelling is "promissory estoppel." If this prof wants to be a stickler for spelling, you should give it right back.

That would almost be worth doing.

[Richie Allen]

I had a paper, in an Ethics class of all places, that was dropped a grade because of, what the "teacher" thought was, a grammatical error. I used quotes for a single word (ie ...my Ethics teacher is a "dick" ) but it was the last word in the sentence and I wasn't sure how to punctuate it. I even asked another teacher and they thought the period should go outside of the quotation marks in such an example ("dick".) Well, my Ethics teacher "thought" that all punctuation should go inside the quotation marks, although he could never provide proof, nor could I find it. We all know that commas and periods go inside the quotation marks if you're setting off speech but do the same rules apply when using quotes like the annoying people that do that thing with their fingers?

The grade drop subsequently dropped my overall grade down to a 92.7 by the end of the semester and he awarded me a B for the class. Ignoring the fact that the school grading scale was 90-100 A, 80-89 B, etc, ignoring the generally accepted rule that you round up and, of course, ignoring the fact that I was below the 93% needed for an A because of a grade drop based on, what he thought might have been, a grammatical error. This B, coupled with two As and two other Bs also dropped me off of the Dean's list with a 3.4 GPA for the semester.

This teacher also had a challenge at the beginning of the year, "find any grammatical errors in any of my syllabi and I will award you a point on your overall grade." After I found out I was headed for a B but before grades officially came out I scrambled to find errors in his syllabuses. I found a couple that I thought were worthy and after initially saying that he'd take a look at them, he later judged that he couldn't give me credit because he would then "have to give everyone in the class credit." He then commented, after seeing how pissed off I was, that "grades shouldn't matter that much to me," and "you'll never forget that rule from now on."

Does anyone know the rule for sure? I very often see single words in quotes, that fall at the end of the sentence, where the punctuation was placed outside of the marks and every time I seethe.

[heyzeus]

Contract law. The bane of my existence.

[Arthur Dent]

Last semester I got half credit on a test question because I answered .06 % instead of 6 %. I can understand if it were a math class but it wasn't.

I wouldn't have given partial credit. 0.06 % is just wrong.

At the end of each class, we used to have to fill out a survey. One of the questions was, "Grades reflect understand of material?" I always voted no on principle.

[MrCrowesGarden]

There was a teacher at my high school who absolutely detested the use of the words "things" and "stuff". One of my friends had a ten-page paper bumped from a 100% to an 85% because he said "things" in it one time.