Over in academics_anon,

kataplexis declares that accepting emailed assignments is an unfair burden for professors.

Apparently, this statement is horribly bigoted against disabled students, and wank ensues.

ETA that the post is now locked, but the comm has open membership. However, for those too lazy to bother, the text:

I don't accept assignments over email. I did once term but had a bunch of students pull the "But I emailed it to you..." line knowing that there was no way for me to confirm or refute their statement. I have since gone to a "no assignments by email" policy. I am curious to see what others think about accepting assignments over email. I don't have a tablet PC so grading it digitally is not a "perk" option. That being the case, I see no benefit and only angst to be had from accepting emailed assignments.

EDIT: Just so everyone knows that I am not some evil meanie, there are always exceptions to every rule on a syllabus to account for emergency situations or to accommodate students with disabilities that might prevent them from attending class on a certain day. Frankly, I am pretty appalled that people would think me so dim as to not have such exception. This whole straw man argument about the "emergency" and "disability" situations needs to stop. It happens on every other post and leads to nothing but trouble. By this same argument, one could say that even asking a student to attend class is discriminatory and I refuse to accept any such argument as valid.

And the response that set off much of the wank, from

courtney8:

I don't mean to be rude, but I really hope you have exceptions to this rule.

My case in point - I have Meniere's disease and fibromyalgia, and am considered by my university to have a valid disability that sometimes prevents me from attending class. While I understand that it is my responsibility to make up whatever work I may have missed, I sometimes have needed to email assignments to my professors in order to do this.

Not allowing emailed assignments, in some cases, could be considered discriminatory, especially when students have documented disability status through their university. Please be careful with your rules, as you may not be aware of what kinds of limitations you are placing on your students.

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limyaael
2007-02-12 04:57 pm UTC (link)

I don't accept e-mailed final assignments for the exact same reason as

kataplexis; one semester, five of my students wanted to e-mail the final essay on which their whole grade depended, didn't send it, and then claimed it must have gone missing in the Internet ether. That led to grade challenges when I failed them and a whole bunch of irritation and bad shit. The same semester, one student claimed a paper was five pages long on her computer, and she didn't know what could have happened to only make it three pages long in Microsoft Word when she e-mailed it to me! Oooh, the Internet gnomes must have magically changed her font!

I can see why people like the convenience, and for some people it's a necessity, but too often students think "convenience" means "loophole."

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	(Anonymous) 2007-02-12 07:14 pm UTC (link)
	Advice on that: I give word minimums, not page minimums. You can't argue with those ;). (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	panthea 2007-02-13 02:47 am UTC (link)
	"The internet lost my words!" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

beandelphiki
2007-02-13 09:41 pm UTC (link)

Except that it's true that different versions of Word will give different word counts. My home computer will give one count; my school-issued laptop is often off that by quite a bit.

I discovered this when I completed an assignment on my home computer, checked the word count and found it satisfactory, and emailed it to my school email account so I could print it at school. (My printer's busted.) When I got to school, downloaded the file and double-checked everything before printing?

Too short.

I "fixed" the assignment....but when I got home, I loaded up the version I had saved and counted each word myself. My home computer's word count was the correct one, hilariously.

Of course, if you have longer assignments with some flex room, it probably doesn't matter. But I'm in journalism, so writing tends to be shorter, and word counts often have to be within 20 words or less to fit a spot on a page, so it matters to me. My laptop is easily off by close to 100 words at times.

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	heddychaa 2007-02-16 09:03 pm UTC (link)
	But try to choose one or the other. It's grating to have "write 5 pages, 1250 words", when generally in a standard font and page set up, 5 pages is usually more around 1600 words. But I generally go for whatever's higher, because I'm an overachiever like that. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	priestesspadfoo 2007-02-13 04:50 am UTC (link)
	Either a LOT of people lie about this or Microsoft Word does weird things with page/line/section breaks, because I've run into it in my working life as well, in a scenario where such formatting nitpicks are crucial and it's my job to make sure they're up to spec. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	limyaael 2007-02-13 05:05 am UTC (link)
	I specify the font I require now. The thing is, I asked her what font she'd used, changed it to that, and it still wasn't five pages. It was only like 750 words. She just didn't write enough. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	priestesspadfoo 2007-02-13 06:55 am UTC (link)
	I sometimes suspect that people change their margins to increase their page counts. O me of little faith. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

jat_sapphire
2007-02-15 07:36 pm UTC (link)

Lo, in the Middle Ages when the computer lab was new, I had a class in which all but one student printed their papers in 12-point, and one would-be crafty person printed his in 16 point. Really, did he think his was the only paper I was looking at, or that after the first fifteen 12-point papers, his ginormous elephantine font wouldn't be, you know, noticeable?

I still tell people: I don't care if you want to print it in 24 point with three-inch margins, but YOU ARE NOT FOOLING ME.

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	jerel 2007-02-18 05:13 pm UTC (link)
	I'm amazed at the number of students who assume we (teachers) are stupid. Not only do we have more education and training, but we were students once too. We used to try larger fonts and big margins to fool our professors. Didn't work on them, won't work on us. (A much easier trick is to increase the space between your letters just a smidge...) (Reply to this)(Parent)

(Anonymous)
2007-02-13 05:21 am UTC (link)

To play devil's advocate, I'm too cheap to buy Microsoft Office or Microsoft Word, so I use the default Mac word processing program, AppleWorks. And I've noticed that when I convert it to a Word document, the font size goes from 12 to 10 and it suddenly looks smaller. But when you change the font size to 12, it's longer in Word than it is in AppleWorks.

So I try to warn professors ahead of time. But then again, I've never had a paper shrink as much as the student in question.

-M. Ouse.

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	melusina 2007-02-13 07:29 pm UTC (link)
	Is that what's going on? My pet theory was that AppleWorks double-spacing is smaller than Word's, so my papers will be longer when I copy them over. Then again, I usually print things out in the computer lab (500 free copies, thanks much) so it all works out. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

(Anonymous)
2007-02-13 08:11 pm UTC (link)

YES. I think it is. In my many years of paper-writing with AppleWorks (back when it used to be ClarisWorks, too, geeze I'm old), I found that the double-spacing ratio is not a true 2, but closer to a 5/3 (if I want five pages double spaced, I need to write three single spaced). I don't know what the ratio is in Word, but I do know that I've become a skilled bullshit artist due to needed to beef up my single-spaced pages.

-M. Ouse.

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