Do you ever have those times when you wish you could play the tit-for-tat game, and actually have it come out in your favor?

My Org Behavior class ended nearly two weeks ago, and grades were due into the Student Records office last Friday…August 3. Grades were to be published online this past Monday and needless to say, I was excited because I’m dying to know how I did both on my individual project and overall in the class.

Monday comes and goes…no grades have been posted. Yesterday, the emails start coming in from fellow classmates, all wondering if we’ve heard from our instructor or seen anything remotely resembling a grade. No one had, so we all start emailing and calling Student Records, wondering what’s up.

Apparently, our instructor just blew off the grade submission deadline. One unhelpful representative had the gall to tell me it was my responsibility to follow up with the instructor because even though there’s a deadline, instructors don’t always meet it. So, I did. Here was her reply:

I will try to get them out to everyone before too long. Final grades should be uploaded into Banner in the next few days.

Um…okay. You know what Business School, I’ll try to pay my tuition and fees for the upcoming semester before too long, even though they were due a week ago. Although, if I haven’t paid, you’ll just drop me from the courses and then not allow me to enroll without facing a monetary penalty. I don’t seem to have any comparable chain of enforcement.

Will I eventually get my grade? Yes, I will…but think about the message this is sending me: my instructor doesn’t give a rat’s ass about her students…or deadlines…or the perception of complacency and disrespect towards people who worked very hard over the past three months. Eh, they can wait…

Before you think I am running this person through the meat grinder for one tiny gaffe in the Grand Scheme of Things, this person was also virtually non-existent the entire class. We never saw her in our threaded discussions, and she’d show up late (or not at all) for scheduled chats which she would set up. Emails went unanswered and…the pièce de résistance …we got 5 extra credit points at the beginning of the term if we sent her an email telling her not only had we read the 20-page syllabus, but would agree to forfeit those 5 extra credit points if we asked her a question at any point during the term which was answered in the syllabus.

And folks…my instructor is an organizational development manager at a rather large corporation in the DFW area, in addition to being an executive coach and leadership consultant. Scary.

Postscript - Our grades were posted about an hour after I posted this…funny how that works. Yay me, I got an A!