Grade appeal please help!!!!!

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Hey everyone!

I am trying to do a grade appeal, if approved, i graduate nursing school..

Here is the situation..

On my exam 4, about shock and burns, there was a question about a mechanical ventilator in a burned patient...in one of the answers options it said "bun" instead of burn, so i did not pick it. Of course the misspelled word was the correct answer. I am trying to fight this question and get my point back because one point is all i need to be at a passing grade and to graduate. I am 0.17% away from what i need.

In the beginning of the semester, my professor posted an announcement stating "Never assume I have made a mistake in the answer options. If I have made a mistake it will NEVER count against you" So if this hold true, then this question should be thrown out and I would pass the class. However, my teacher is refusing to go by her word and will not award me the point. In my appeal i brought this up and it was totally ignored by my professor and used "spell check" as an excuse instead.

On top of this, she has now told me (5 days before graduation) that she made another error in calculating my exam score and I actually got one more wrong than she thought. Mind you, this exam was taken at the beginning of the semester and now is being brought up 5 days before graduation when I was trying to get my point back. If my teacher stuck by her word, none of this would be happening.

Does anyone have any tips or similar stories??

Any help would be appreciated.

thank you

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Specializes in SICU, trauma, neuro.

I would think the time to bring it up should have been during the exam: "Professor, is this supposed to be 'burn,' not 'bun?'" Rather than assuming the answer is wrong. I mean I can't think of how the word "bun" would make it a REASONABLE wrong answer.

Q: Which of the following is indication for mechanical ventilation?

A) wrong answer

B) correct-ish answer #1

C) correct-ish answer #2

D) full thickness buns on the pt's face and neck

Um.... "Bun" as in someone's butt? Buns as in the pt spilled his White Castle bag on his face? While in the absence of the typo, D is a clearly correct answer.

I would think that the prof's vow not to hold you accountable for her mistake would refer to her believing "C" is the correct answer, but student can argue EBP says "D" is most correct. NOT that she can make what is clearly a typo, and you are absolved of your need to critically think.

As for the 2nd incorrect answer, well you have already appealed; she probably reviewed everything with a fine-tooth comb to ensure the accuracy of your grade. She could just as easily found an incorrectly-marked WRONG answer and said "Good news! This isn't necessary, because I found a point on an earlier exam you didn't get credit for, and you passed! I'm terribly sorry about that, but glad you brought it up."

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Specializes in NICU, ICU, PICU, Academia.

I see this a lot. Students focus on THAT ONE question on the exam that 'caused them to fail' while not recognizing all of the other wrong answers which made THAT ONE question the tipping point. Hopefully, you will be allowed to repeat this course and graduate next term.

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why is eveyone ignoring the fact that the instructor wrote to us "Never assume I have made a mistake in the answer options. If I have made a mistake it will NEVER count against you". The instructor made a mistake in her question and I am simply following her own directions given to us.

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The instructor was not present during the exam and we are not allowed to ask questions during exams

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Specializes in NICU, ICU, PICU, Academia.

No one is ignoring it. Your instructor made a typo- not a content error. Own your mistake, learn from it and move on.

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Specializes in Critical Care; Cardiac; Professional Development.

Did your instructor put that in writing? If not, it was never said.

Kind of the same as the saying "If it wasn't documented, it wasn't done."

Either way, you missed another question on top of this one (now found) and repairing this one won't matter. I am not at all unsympathetic. However, you missed a lot of other questions too and a lot of other things throughout the semester to put your grade in this fragile state. Saying that it all comes down to your instructor not standing by his or her word is ignoring what you yourself have to do with this awful situation. You knew going in that your grade was hanging in the balance.

I suspect you will not win this one, but it sounds like escalating this to the administration is your only option at this point. Be careful about trying to toss your instructor under the bus. That never goes well.

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Specializes in 15 years in ICU, 22 years in PACU.
I see this a lot. Students focus on THAT ONE question on the exam that 'caused them to fail' while not recognizing all of the other wrong answers which made THAT ONE question the tipping point. Hopefully, you will be allowed to repeat this course and graduate next term.

If you had a solid "B" that indicated you had command of the subject matter, one point would not be an issue.

As it is, you are just shy of passing. In other words, you failed. Maybe you should repeat the class to learn the material rather than argue a typo.

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I agree with you OP. My teacher had a similar sisuation with a word typo on the exam but I knew other answers were wrong and I validated the typo with the professor before I clicked. Though the professor owned up to her mistake and gave everyone the 2 points back anyway. So, I do think you deserve to get those few points back to graduate because it is not your fault but the instructor's fault to make sure that the exam is fair.

I say do whatever you have to do to get those points back.

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I would not interpret "Never assume I have made a mistake in the answer options" as meaning I should just assume all the answers are correct. I would have asked (as another poster already noted). There were often typos in the test questions in my nursing program a kazillion years ago, typos that could change the meaning of the question or one of the possible answers, or typos that just made an answer clearly not make any sense, and I would always ask the instructor and clarify what the question was supposed to say. I did it so often (there were a lot of typos ...) that the instructors got tired of it and would good-naturedly, humorously hassle me about it a little, and I would always explain that I was not going to take a chance on misinterpreting a question, and, if they didn't want me to come up during the exam and ask them about a question, they should proofread their tests better.

I agree with other posters that, if you were so close to failing that one or two test questions can make you fail out of a class, you have a bigger problem than just having missed one or two questions. If you had a solid grade going into the exam, this would not even be a discussion.

Best wishes, though!

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Back in school my anatomy teacher had a questions about muscles/tendons, and how they compared to different part of a manual transmission. The problem was the vast majority of the students drove automatics. We raised our hand, pleaded ignorance, and our professor made a diagram on the board of the gears involved with driving "stick." And I still got the question wrong. Not because I misunderstood what was being asked - I didn't get the anatomy. My strong suspicion is that you would have picked the wrong answer even if is said BURN.

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I agree with you OP. My teacher had a similar sisuation with a word typo on the exam but I knew other answers were wrong and I validated the typo with the professor before I clicked. Though the professor owned up to her mistake and gave everyone the 2 points back anyway. So, I do think you deserve to get those few points back to graduate because it is not your fault but the instructor's fault to make sure that the exam is fair.

I say do whatever you have to do to get those points back.

OsceanSN2019, that was your instructor's discretion to give those points back. As it is the OPs instructor's discretion to not do so. The instructor made the exam fair. The question actually still makes sense even though it said bun instead of burn - as here.I.stand stated:

I would think the time to bring it up should have been during the exam: "Professor, is this supposed to be 'burn,' not 'bun?'" Rather than assuming the answer is wrong. I mean I can't think of how the word "bun" would make it a REASONABLE wrong answer.

Q: Which of the following is indication for mechanical ventilation?

A) wrong answer

B) correct-ish answer #1

C) correct-ish answer #2

D) full thickness buns on the pt's face and neck

Um.... "Bun" as in someone's butt? Buns as in the pt spilled his White Castle bag on his face? While in the absence of the typo, D is a clearly correct answer.

I would think that the prof's vow not to hold you accountable for her mistake would refer to her believing "C" is the correct answer, but student can argue EBP says "D" is most correct. NOT that she can make what is clearly a typo, and you are absolved of your need to critically think.

As for the 2nd incorrect answer, well you have already appealed; she probably reviewed everything with a fine-tooth comb to ensure the accuracy of your grade. She could just as easily found an incorrectly-marked WRONG answer and said "Good news! This isn't necessary, because I found a point on an earlier exam you didn't get credit for, and you passed! I'm terribly sorry about that, but glad you brought it up."

I understand you stated earlier that your instructor wasn't present for the exam and that you aren't allowed to ask questions during an exam anyways? That is weird! I have never heard of an instructor not allowing questions to be asked during an exam! I know some have rules, such as don't leave your seat during the exam, if you have a question raise your hand and the instructor will come to you. And other instructors just have you come up to them during the exam. But, I've never heard of instructors not allowing questions at all during an exam!

Regardless. If you knew the information, you would have been able to eliminate the other answer choices and seen that even with the typo, that is the only answer that made sense. Also, you were right on the line of passing. If you really knew the information you'd been taught over the semester, this point wouldn't have made a difference in you passing.

Your instructor finding another point that you missed on an older exam - you make it seem like you think he/she found this just because you are trying to fight the missed point from the typo. However, when you started fighting the typo, he/she probably decided to go over your other tests more closely - this could have led to him/her finding out that he/she made a mistake grading a past exam, and that the issue over this point from the typo didn't matter because you passed thanks to finding out another exam was misgraded (as here.I.stand stated), but what ended up happening was he/she did find a mistake in the grading, it just wasn't in your favor.

Being so close that one, or even two, points makes or breaks you means you have a bigger issue - you didn't really grasp the information learned in this course this semester. It isn't about your teacher "keeping her word," I'm sure when she said "Never assume I have made a mistake in the answer options" she meant typos. I would never have assumed that. But then again, when I was in nursing school I never assumed anything!! I probably asked too many questions during an exam! But I always felt it was better to ask then to just assume and get the question wrong. But then again, we were allowed to ask questions during an exam (still can't get over that you can't!!!). Anyways, even if your teacher "kept her word" and gave you the point back, because, unfortunately, this issue over the point with the typo unearthed another point you missed on a previous exam. So, your teacher "keeping her word" at this point is moot. You are not longer at the point where getting that one point back willl let you pass.

Regardless, I hope everything works out for you! It stinks stressing about passing a course, especially when you are about to graduate! I'm sorry you have to go through it! Hopefully, it will all work out! If not, just take the course over, look at it as a chance to beef up your knowledge of something you didn't quite master the first time over, graduate, and move on!!

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