I Was Cheated

Too many students are cheated because they are afraid to speak up against a situation which they believe is not right. For example, unfair marks. With hundreds of papers to correct, many teachers hire graduate students to mark papers, and it’s easy for a marker to give an inaccurate grade. I discovered this the hard way.

During my first year of university, I was very nervous when I was about to receive my first graded university assignment because it was worth 10 % of my mark for that course and it would be the first reflection of my progress in university. Not to mention, I had put in an untold amount of effort and hours into this assignment. When the paper was handed back to me, I desperately flipped through the pages until I came across my mark. I was not happy. Very unhappy, in fact. The mark that I received for the assignment did not reflect the amount of agonizing work that I put into the assignment. I was convinced that university was going to be impossible.

I was so distraught that I decided to confront my professor due to the fact that the assignment lacked corrections. I figured that if I didn’t know where I went wrong, I couldn’t improve for future assignments. Surprisingly, my initiative paid off. My professor was stunned at some of the inexplicable, unjustified marks that I'd received. He decided to have the paper regraded. When the time came for me to pick up my newly graded paper, I was curious as to how my mark would change. (Like, curious to the point that I couldn't sleep the night before.) Would the professor find a lot of corrections and significantly increase my mark, or would he find that it had been correctly graded, be insulted that I'd even asked, and drastically lower my mark in spite?

When I picked up my paper I was ecstatic. My mark increased by 32% and was now sitting at a 92. I informed my friend who was taking the same class and her mark increased nearly 30% as well. This was not the only time that proofreading corrected assignments paid off. In fact, after examining a sociology exam, I was able to get the entire class’s marks to increase by 2% because of a mistake that the professor made on a multiple choice test.

After this incident, I realized how important it is to check over corrected assignments. If you feel that a mark is not justified, don’t be afraid to confront a professor about it. However, I do advise that you have good rationale behind why you believe the mark is not what it should be. I also recommend that you be polite to the professor about the situation. The professor is less likely to sympathize with your grade if you bolt into his room demanding that your mark be changed. In that case, he probably will change your mark, but chances are that it may not be in your favour.