Physics Students Want Their Final Grades Counted

Dear Physics Department,

As students at NSU, we pay for an education which we expect to be held at a certain standard. We work extremely hard to achieve the best grades possible. For many of us, that meant spending endless hours leading up to finals week to prepare for ALL of our semester finals, which included our physics final exams.

If a student makes an academic mistake, it is seen as the student's fault and they are the ones who have to make up for it; the physics department should be held to the same standard. A mistake was somehow made on your part, except now the consequences are being placed on the students. A professor unjustly distributed the exam to their students, and the penalty is being placed on us. We are being told to take our grade as is, or spend our winter break studying to retake our physics exam when many of us were planning on being with family, working, studying for graduate exams or participating in internships.

Many of us have already planned our timelines and schedules for the upcoming year. A good amount of students being placed in this situation have MCATs, DATs, and job interviews in the upcoming weeks and months. Being asked to retake a final exam that we have already taken due to an error made on your part is extremely unreasonable. The final exam was supposed to be a significant portion of our grades. For many students, doing well on the exam had the ability to raise an entire letter grade. As you might already know, that makes a significant impact on our GPAs. Having to worry about this exam for an additional month, especially while we are working towards graduation and post-graduation goals, is completely unreasonable.

In addition, many students had registered for a specific professor's classes, only to find out a week prior to the semester starting that we were not getting the professor we had chosen. This forced many students to network together in order to learn all of the required material, as the newer professor did not meet our expectations. It is unacceptable that studying off of resources distributed by professors at NSU has led to a widespread unjust burden to many students.
We understand that you think it is unfair that the final was distributed to some students prior to the exam, but we think it is unfair to ask us to retake an exam for a class which many of us thought was over at the end of the semester.

No student knew for a fact that they would walk into the final exam with the answers. We had simply studied the materials made available to us, and now we are being penalized for doing so. As students, we are asking you to grade the final exams we have already studied for and taken. These grades should be included in our course grades, as we have worked hard for our grades. A fair compromise would be to count this exam for 15% of the grade, rather than 20%. However, asking many of us to take an exam for a second time, or to accept a different grade which does not reflect our hard work during finals week, is simply unjust to those students who studied for the final exam scores they earned.

In conclusion, this entire situation is unacceptable for a private university. The university holds us to certain standards, and we uphold the physics department to certain standards as well. These standards are not being met, which is very disappointing.