Students look to defenders for help with grade disputes
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Last semester, when horticulture senior Brendan O’Keefe calculated his final grades, he was satisfied he would get a 4.0.
But when his sociology professor ended up giving him a 3.5 in the class, O’Keefe took issue and contacted the professor with his concerns.
After a series of argumentative emails, O’Keefe said he ended up dropping the issue.
“It might have been a miscalculation on either of our parts, (but) he seemed pretty set on it,” he said.
Grade disputes similar to O’Keefe’s from last semester take the cake for student cases heard so far this semester by the Student Defenders program, amounting to more than half of total cases heard so far.
Director of Legal Services and Student Defenders Andrew Block said of the eight cases the program has heard, about five have been cases of grade disputes.
Block said during the spring semester, students are more likely to appeal unsatisfactory grades than other times because of the shorter break between semesters. The cases involve students disagreeing with their final grades or test scores.
The Student Defenders program is a division of legal services provided to tax-paying members of ASMSU, MSU’s undergraduate student government, and the Council of Graduate Students, or COGS.
The five student defenders in the department act as counsel for academic issues — including grade disputes or academic dishonesty, and judicial cases — including citations for possession of alcohol in the dorms or violent behavior, Block said.
The Student Defenders heard 14 total cases last semester and about 40 during the 2010-11 academic year, he said. Block said academic issues make up about 75 percent of cases and judicial issues make up the remaining 25 percent, but there was no trend in further breakdown of what cases were most common.
Economics and political science senior Adam Ratliff has been a student defender for two years and said he usually hears about two or three cases per semester.
When Ratliff is assigned a case, he said he first sits down with the student to discuss the issue before putting together a defense relating to the general student regulations, a set of rules established in the MSU community to ensure the success of its members.
Most cases do not end with a unanimous decision supporting or opposing the student who brought the case but rather a compromise between the two, which in the case of a grade dispute is the student and professor, he said.
“Most of the time it’s somewhere in the middle,” he said, “(We) make sure everyone understands what happened and try to work for the best resolution.”
Ratliff said some of the hearings can take months — one even took several semesters — depending on how quickly the university grants a hearing request.
But Block said because not all cases brought to the program end up in a hearing, there is no official record of the number and types of cases heard.
Staff writer Darcie Moran contributed to this report.
