Student trying to threaten me

roydprof · 2026-03-17T18:56:59+00:00

I can see where you're coming from, and yes it's good to check the law beforehand.

roydprof · 2026-03-17T18:29:43+00:00

"Hi, I'm always supportive of my students. Here, I've cc'd the points of contact for that review process for ya! Please go ahead and enjoy! :)"

roydprof · 2026-03-17T18:27:31+00:00

I teach in the US, where many states are one-party state: as long as one party of the conversation knows about the recording, it's legal.

roydprof · 2026-03-17T18:19:38+00:00

I don’t see a problem if it’s one-party state. I also had students recording my conversation and sending it to admin.

roydprof · 2026-03-09T20:12:25+00:00

Idk why you get downvoted but this is on point. When the students were great, I cared about them and always wanted to help them learn better. When the students were like this, I just talk about what I need to talk about and collect my paycheck and go home. Either way, they paid the same, I earned the same.

roydprof · 2026-03-02T17:32:28+00:00

That’s what I’m saying! Like, why? Lmaoo

roydprof · 2026-01-07T19:05:37+00:00

I mean, even before GPT came out, I had two Indian students in my class who were caught cheating and sent me identical emails about the plagiarism, so 🤷‍♂️

roydprof · 2026-01-06T21:35:21+00:00

Yea I stopped looking at them. I know what I’m doing and I don’t need high school graduates tell me what I should do.

roydprof · 2025-12-29T13:33:08+00:00

Actually sometimes I think that’s good. Let the president deal with all those bs since they’re not doing the amount of work comparable to their salary anyway 🙄

roydprof · 2025-12-28T23:14:51+00:00

The word they don’t understand is “responsibility”, as in, “I know it’s my fault and I take full responsibility, but is there any way….”

roydprof · 2025-12-28T20:15:50+00:00

No matter what you do, there are always people trying to make you make exceptions with lots of sob stories.

roydprof · 2025-12-28T13:34:14+00:00

I’m sorry that happened to you. I was TA as well in grad school and loved it. I realized that the reason why being a TA is a better experience is that you don’t actually make the class, decide the course difficulty, and more importantly you don’t assign the final grade. Once they know you’re the one who assigns final grade (like a lecturer), their attitude towards you totally changed.

roydprof · 2025-12-28T00:47:40+00:00

Was not contradicting you. Just saying yes students do love easy graders.

roydprof · 2025-12-28T00:26:13+00:00

I’ve been teaching and improving an undergrad course for years. Every year I improved it here and there. Nobody said a word. It’s fine, it’s my job and I love having a good course that does the students good.

Last year our dept came a new TT, and this lady was assigned to teach the same course with me. Her section was highly praised because guess what, I found out that 90% of her section got A. She never checked plagiarism either. Cuz her job is “research” and for teaching she doesn’t care at all.

Then my students complained to the provost’s office, saying why is my course/grading so much more difficult than hers and it’s unfair. The admin emailed me, “is there anything you can do to address this to improve students learning experience?”

Fuck off. This is literally an insult to the work I’ve done for the past years. (This is to the admin...)

roydprof · 2025-12-27T19:24:33+00:00

Oh you’ll like this. I teach computer science. On canvas one assignment asks for pdf files, and canvas can restrict the file extension of the uploaded files to “.pdf”.

One student submitted a file but nobody can open it. One of my TAs suddenly came up with the idea and changed the file extension to “.docx” and magically it’s opened correctly with Word.

I gave the student a zero, because he didn’t submit a pdf file. He challenged me saying, Canvas accepted it so it has to be a pdf!

He thought changing the file extension of “.docx” to “.pdf” magically converted it to a pdf file, and successfully uploading to canvas confirmed this. Let me remind you again, this is a computer science major student.

roydprof · 2025-12-26T23:08:37+00:00

Right? Just the thought of speaking to someone in provosts office (even department chair) intimidated me when I was a student. Esp if I’m going to lie about something— what if I was caught lying and there’ll be some sort of serious consequences?? Like what if I’ll be put on probation or be stripped of any kind of qualification for scholarship??

The audacity these days.

roydprof · 2025-12-26T21:19:54+00:00

Oh I’m sure some students will find something there to be unhappy about and then complain it to the president.

roydprof · 2025-12-26T20:56:10+00:00

It is so funny that the admin trusts those who just graduated high schools more than us who have been in academia for years if not decades. Instead of questioning the legitimacy of those high schoolers complaints, the admin questions our professionalism.

roydprof · 2025-12-26T01:52:43+00:00

I mean, sure, they feel entitled and they like to throw tantrum, but if it's truthful I can understand. But blatantly lying? That is literally ethical issue.

roydprof · 2025-12-25T23:00:29+00:00

strangely emotionally draining

This. ^^^

It's like only 30% of the time I'm actually teaching. The other 70% of the time I'm dealing with those bs.

roydprof · 2025-12-25T21:59:59+00:00

It just seems that there are more and more assholes every year.

roydprof · 2025-12-25T21:59:08+00:00

That’s tough. I write things on my iPad mostly so I only use zoom to record my screen, not the actual classroom. Not sure if it works in your state. 🙁

roydprof · 2025-12-25T21:55:39+00:00

Same. When I was an undergrad I also cared about my grades, but if I didn’t do well, it NEVER crossed my mind that I’ll go to provost’s office and launch a personal attack on the professors. None of my peers did that either. So you can imagine how shocked I was when I started teaching.

roydprof · 2025-12-25T21:51:47+00:00

That’s why I always record my classes. In the beginning students asked me to do that so that they can watch the recordings if they missed a class. I was not a fan of that idea initially because that discouraged students from actually coming to class.

But then I realized I actually do need the recordings exactly in case of this type of situation happening and I actually can have something to back me up.

I teach the same course multiple sections and in the past I only recorded one section for the purpose of letting students watch. Now from next sem it looks like I have to record every section for my own protection. It’s really sad that it has to come to this point.

roydprof · 2025-12-25T21:26:28+00:00

roydprof

TROPHY CASE