One change in speech pattern I attempt to achieve in my student's
discussion of course grades is the replacement of the verb "give" with the
verb "award" in the typical sentence of "The teacher gives the student a
grade." so that the sentence becomes "The teacher awards the grade the
student earns."  I also stress the sentence gaining a new verb performed by
the object of the sentence.  I often write these two sentences on the board
the first day of class.  After doing so I do not encounter frivolous
requests for make up exams and I only once have had a student miss an exam
and -then- request a make up exam.  That single missing student was kept in
police custody at a traffic accident, and the police office accompanied the
student when the request for a make up exam was made upon the insistance of
the student.

      With that as back ground, I would award the grade earned by the
missing student on the exam during the exam time:  zero.

      I am remarkably flexible when a student has a genuine commercial
impracticability or commercial impossibility for contract performance.
Finals were last week.  The last final I administer will be at 6:00 PM on
Friday, May 20 because that is the time most convenient for the student.
The student was ordered by USCIS (www.uscis.gov:  the post-9-11 replacement
of INS) to attend a judicial hearing while physically present in his home
country.  Upon production of the order of the federal administrative
agency, this State employee was preempted.  There was not a student in the
room who did not begin to grasp in a whole new way the topics they had been
assigned to learn during the semester.

      I find that what students tend to call an "unreasonable" or "not
respectful" teach is a teacher who believes syllabi are contracts,
enforcement of contract rights is a reasonable expectation, and who only
yields to impracticability, impossibility, or preemption.  Since that is
what I am trying to teach I do not view those appellations as necessarily
"bad".

      Oh, by the way, how fast do you believe your school's student grape
vine is?

      Today, grant a baseless demand for unilateral student revision of the
syllabus in one semester and you may reasonably expect in many future
semesters to hear of that very decision.  Not quite rightly, but with some
genuine equitable force, students will point to that decision as course of
performance in a previous edition of an adhesion contract by that drafter
of the adhesion contract, and students will assert that prior decision is
res judica on the subsequent editions of that drafter's adhesion contracts,
or, alternatively, is establishment of an unambiguous usage of trade.
That, all students everywhere understand intuitively.

Michael

P.S.:  The fastest I -saw- the UNO student grape vine move was with a
student appeal to waive a required graduate course.  The appeal was denied
at 4:50 PM.  At 5:30 PM I encountered two students discussing the decision
with accuracy.

Professor Michael J. O'Hara, J.D., Ph.D.  Editor, Journal of Legal
Economics
Finance, Banking, & Law Department        [log in to unmask]
College of Business Administration        (402) 554 - 2014 voice fax (402)
554 - 3825
Roskens Hall 502                    www.AAEFE.org
University of Nebraska at Omaha           www.JournalOfLegalEconomics.com
Omaha  NE  68182
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(402) 554 - 2823 voice  fax (402) 554 - 2680
http://cba.unomaha.edu/faculty/mohara/web/ohara.htm