Have you ever wondered if your prof has been sitting around dusty tomes in moldy rooms for one year too many?  I had an incident like that this week.

I won’t go into particulars, but as a part of the senior project I recently turned in I was supposed to write a paper on the process of researching a historic topic.  Okay, a little odd, but nothing I couldn’t whip up.  Just to be on the safe side I made sure I’d correctly interpreted the guideline/instructions by running what I planned past my prof.  As usual, I made sure the copy was clean and I’d checked off each criteria, then sent it in.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the prof writes back to say that he was disappointed in my work, felt I’d blown off the guidelines, and that he was generous in giving me a C grade.

What?!

I wrote him a chilly reply in which I quoted the emphasis requirements, and also cut and paste his own email into mine.  I pointed out that if I had misread the instructions, then there was a serious confusion in their writing, and he and the school should get that cleared up.

Then I took a deep breath, or maybe two, rewrote the tone of the email so it was polite, and sent it.

Yesterday I got his reply.  He apologized, and admitted that he took home my assignment with a bundle of others.  They were also senior projects, but of a different major so they had different requirements, but he graded mine along with theirs by their criteria.  He apologized again and promised to change the grade.

I just checked, and he’s done that.  I now have a 100% on that portion of the assignment, and a high A overall.  The question is, did he over-grade me when he changed it, and over compensate for his mistake?  While I know I didn’t turn in a C paper, I doubt it was flawless, either.

Perhaps I should send him an email and protest.