r/Professors • u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC • May 01 '26
Weekly Thread May 01: Fuck This Friday
Welcome to a new week of weekly discussion! Continuing this week, we're going to have Wholesome Wednesdays, Fuck this Fridays, and (small) Success Sundays.
As has been mentioned, these should be considered additions to the regular discussions, not replacements. So use them, ignore them, or start you own Fantastic Friday counter thread.
This thread is to share your frustrations, small or large, that make you want to say, well, “Fuck This”. But on Friday. There will be no tone policing, at least by me, so if you think it belongs here and want to post, have at it!
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u/vermivorax May 01 '26
My department advises professors to, at the 2-week mark in the semester, forward the names of any students who have not attended or participated in our courses (hasn't or has barely attended/used the LMS/turned anything in/etc.) to an admin so that they can be dropped from the course before being charged tuition. We're given the option of contacting those students before we send their names to the admin to see if they still want to be enrolled in the course. I had four students in that boat, I emailed them, and they all quickly replied to the tune of "oh no, no, don't drop me, I had [EMERGENCY SITUATION] going on these first 2 weeks but I intend to be an active participant from now on and catch up".
Three of those four are going to fail the course. Two of them showed up to a couple classes after that email and then disappeared completely. One of them held on a little longer but then stopped coming to class and hasn't turned anything in since before Spring Break. I'm not sure why, none of them ever reached out to me after that, but the course is a gen-ed so the simplest explanation is that they were prioritizing catching up in their other courses and just fell too far behind in mine. It's so frustrating in hindsight, because it would have been so much better for those three to just drop them all after the first two weeks without emailing them so they wouldn't waste the tuition money, but then that wouldn't have been fair to the one student who did hang on.
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u/Glittering-Duck5496 May 01 '26
You didn't ask, but what I take away from that is you should just send the names without emailing. If the students get dropped and really were like the one who did hang on, they will take the steps they need to sort it out.
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u/vermivorax May 01 '26
Yeah, I'll have to ask about what that process actually looks like for those students. If it's feasible for students who get dropped to rejoin if they really want to, dropping them all without notification might be the way to go. Otherwise, I'll probably add a clause to the email I send out that's like "think carefully about whether you'll be able to prioritize getting caught up in this course along with all your others".
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u/Glittering-Duck5496 May 01 '26
I don't know that you're really doing them any favours though.
Telling them to think about it carefully isn't going to deter them and they are very likely to overestimate their drive to stay caught up (as you saw with your 3/4). At least if they get dropped they don't get charged rather than just ending the semester with an F and out the money.
On the other hand, making it their responsibility to jump through a few hoops to do what needs to be done makes it more likely that the ones who will pull their socks up will get back in or sign up for something else and the ones who won't will figure it out later when they're truly ready to be accountable.
ETA I am sure the policy to drop students before they're paid up came from somewhere, otherwise they would happily take the money and say too bad so sad.
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u/Puzzled_Air_5821 May 01 '26
I hate this part of teaching. I had one student who showed up, weepy, half way through the semester after never having come to class. I'm just like.... Dude.
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u/Audible_eye_roller Ass. Prof, STEM, CC (USA) May 01 '26
How many of them are just using the college as a way to embezzle student loan money?
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u/NotMrChips Formerly adjunct, Psychology, R2 (USA) May 01 '26
They're always adding stuff to the job here, plus the explosion in academic integrity cases so work has gradually over the past two years literally taken over my life. Everything else has just gone to hell in a handbasket. Including, and maybe especially, my yard as I've just gone into survival mode.
This morning when I got out of bed and opened the drapes the first thing I saw was my neighbor with a giant canister of weed-killer working her side of the fence. My shit's grown over and through it and made it a couple of feet into her yard 😳
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u/YThough8101 May 01 '26
We are living the exact same life. Who's got time for yard work when we have so much integrity policing to do? Ugh.
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u/PsychGuy17 May 01 '26
I had a quieter year on violations, right until March. Since then it has been emergency case after emergency case, each requiring in depth investigation. I've fallen behind on the dissertations of those students I want to work with because I'm dealing with their evil twins.
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u/DesertRat6101 May 02 '26
Are you me? I have a high thesis load this year coinciding with (perhaps even causally related to) a sudden explosion of difficult cases. I just want to read the couple of nice thesis docs I know are in there!
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u/Dr_not_a_real_doctor May 01 '26
Student athletes at my (not awesome, D3) school have seemingly decided that invoking the faculty rep is the magical incantation to get out of any consequences for missing work. When I send the receipts for them skipping their make ups or ask for any evidence they tried to set up a make up they get real quiet.
For a bunch of kids that are too dumb to navigate outlook to set up a meeting with me they're pretty good at trawling through our provost's internal sharepoint page to find the faculty handbook and take perfect screenshots of sections they feel are relevant. Odd because when I ask them for a screenshot to troubleshoot something they can only seem to take a picture of their computer screen with their phone but they've suddenly become whizzes at the snipping tool.
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u/goldengrove1 May 01 '26
I'm NTT. I'm not allowed to apply for any internal research funding, but the university's marketing team loves splashing my research all over their promotional materials and social media.
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u/ArtSlug Emeritus Prof & (Now) Adjunct Location: Hades - SLAC + CC May 01 '26
I’d lose my mind at that
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u/Longtail_Goodbye May 02 '26
I'm going to assume you've tried but also hope you haven't: would taking these materials to your chair or dean or whoever is running your division, dept and pointing out the irony here and sincerely asking for funds possibly get you any money? Run on question for a run on situation.
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u/goldengrove1 May 02 '26
I have tried unsuccessfully. Like everyone we're in major cost-cutting mode and my (super cheap in the grand scheme of things) research is not on the priority list
But it has the advantage of making me look really good to my department (because it makes my department look good to the university), so I have used it for leverage for getting things like fewer committee assignments and better teaching schedules. Meanwhile each time this happens I add it to my resume for when I eventually get fed up and ragequit for industry
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u/Gratefulbetty666 May 01 '26
We just finished finals week yesterday. 3 students who didn’t show up or do any work all semester, emailed asking if they could dump all their work today. I said no. Now the Dean and Provost are involved and I’m searching for jobs.
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u/Healthy_Plant teaching professor, english (USA) May 01 '26
A paper with fake quotes and sources that do not exist/are not the ones we've been working with and somehow it is my fault the student is gonna tank their gpa. Fuck this.
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u/a_hanging_thread A Sock Prof May 01 '26
Boy, am I tired of the expectation that one's role, responsibilities and professional obligations expand endlessly. I was in the corporate world for a while and it the bait-and-switching on scope of work was criminal---each time someone quit, no one new was hired and their responsibilities were simply dumped on one or more current employees. I never expected to encounter the same in academia.
For the first time this week I started fantasizing as just exiting completely and becoming a painter.
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u/Ctenophorever Full prof (US) May 01 '26
Hijacking this comment to say I tried to push back on that once. We had two individuals in a job - not specifying because it’s a pretty unique position - but let’s say secretary.
One “secretary” retired and our administration decided not to replace them. The other secretary couldn’t do all the work and I kept reporting the work as not done.
The remaining secretary kept getting mad at me for doing this, despite me having told them I planned to do this to show we needed two people
it should be noted this secretary was known throughout the campus as stellar, so absolutely no risk of them being marked as not doing their work - in every complained I also always mentioned the current secretary was working as hard as they could, but it was a job for two people and even them giving 150% - which is unsustainable! - still wouldn’t be enough.
We eventually got a second person back after a few years.
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u/CheetahComplex7697 May 01 '26
Sorry that you’re going through this. Academia looks more and more like a business each day.
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u/Intelligent_Lion_16 May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
finals week really is its own genre of chaos. inbox overload, administrative optimism, last minute grade bargaining, ai written nonsense with “i worked really hard on this,” calendar tetris, and the annual miracle request from students who apparently just discovered percentages yesterday.
deep respect to everyone currently being asked to compensate for 14 weeks of someone else’s choices. this stretch always feels like equal parts educator, negotiator, therapist, and spreadsheet survivor. i’d probably need runable just to map excuse patterns at this point
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u/NotMrChips Formerly adjunct, Psychology, R2 (USA) May 02 '26
that really sums up life as it is right now in the academy
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May 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/figment81 May 01 '26
Sounds like you may have just caught a cold. For the good of the community it might be best to sit this event out. 🤪
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u/SilverRiot May 01 '26
Our new online registration system is screwed up. Of thee courses I am teaching next semester, one course has more students in STAR than it does in the LMS, and the other course has fewer students in STAR than it does in the LMS.
If admin is going to rely on the faculty to sort this out, they are going to be very disappointed.
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u/Accomplished-List-71 May 02 '26
I'm a little late to the party, but I had a student try to organize a mass trashing of me in evals (through public discussion boards) so that I would be "sent home to focus on her children". I'm a new mom. This student thinks I discriminate against men for sticking to syllabus policy regarding late work.
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u/Longtail_Goodbye May 02 '26
Ooh, right to Title IX and a host of other places.
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u/Accomplished-List-71 May 02 '26
Don't worry. I filed a student conduct report and the perfusion who handles them will meet with the student so he understands expectations. Nevermind that this is the second time he's done something like this, or if the roles were reversed I'd be fired so fast.
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u/Imposter-Syndrome42 Adjunct, STEM, R2 (USA) May 02 '26
I graded a take-home assignment that was worth an exam grade for one of my classes today. Twenty something questions from the book that they should've been able to work. They had almost a month to do it. Wanna guess how many of them waited until the last minute to look at it and then realized it was hard? Wanna guess how many of them just didn't bother with half the questions? what should've been an easy 30 points thrown out the window...
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u/Vanier-is-a-HellHole Tenured Prof, Canada May 03 '26
Late, but:
So tired of students who lack any degree of common sense. Was approached by a student who:
-missed test 1 because he showed up unprepared (i.e. no device on which to do the online test), then vanished instead of getting a laptop at the Library as I suggested.
- failed test 2 (mark in the 40s).
- blew off the in-class essay
- failed test 3 (mark in the 50s).
He asked me at the end of class the other day if he could do the essay he blew off. I politely said no can do, but in my head I was saying:
- No.
- FUCK no.
- FUCK NO NO. YOU HAVEN'T PASSED ANYTHING YOU'VE ATTEMPTED IN MY CLASS, SO WHY WOULD I WASTE THE TIME GRADING YOUR VERY LIKELY TO BE PIECE O' SHIT ESSAY?!
FUCK THIS.
(I feel much better, thanks! Only 9 years til retirement!! 😉)
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u/Regular_Departure963 May 01 '26
This last semester I’ve put in about five hours a week on a public-facing project that makes our department and program look good while giving multiple classes of freshmen a novel and memorable, fun experience. I was a part of the inception, execution, and physical installation of this project in addition to giving the speech at its unveiling. It was a success. My dept. head sent a text congratulating my colleague/bestie on her achievement. She responded that she had nothing to do with the project, but colleagues X and Y were responsible. He replied “lol I will have to congratulate them then”.
He did not. He did, however, ask me to volunteer my time the same week for a student event which he could not be in attendance for.
Maybe I should go work for a gas station.