In eighth grade, at the age of 14, I received the lowest grade of my life. It was in algebra class. I remember not-so-fondly sitting in the math room, staring at a piece of paper that I was supposed to fill by the end of class. The five or ten problems on the page, to me, might as well have been the schematics for some kind of internal submarine support device. Bref, I was in way over my head, and wouldn’t have minded it too much if extraterrestrials had chosen that moment to invade southeastern Michigan.
On that day, I decided that a career in math was not for me. I was saddened, but not altogether surprised, when the grade came back: 41%. So it’s in that spirit that I announce today that it’s official: I will not be following a career in glaciers. I will not be a glaciertologist, or whatever. As of today, there is a new Lowest Grade Ever. A new feather in my cap of mediocrity, if you will.
But before I tell you what I actually received, let me explain the French grading system a little bit. In theory, marks range from 0 to 20, a 0 indicating that you failed to sign your name correctly and a 20 meaning that you just might be the Messiah. Realistically, however, professors tend to assign only grades taken from the middle six or seven numbers. That means that for super-good work, you might receive a 14. What’s more is that the notion of “passing” and “failing” doesn’t seem to exist in France the same way as it does in North America: in principle, I’m supposed to receive a minimum of a 10 to be able to transfer credits home. Realistically, however, French students I’ve met have often felt quite content with their 9’s or 8’s.
So you who are accustomed to already-difficult McGill grades: imagine working your tail off for four months on a subject, poring over books and academic papers and writing the best dissertation the world has ever known. And feeling happy when you receive a 65%: at McGill, a low B-. In France, that’s a 13, which is considered perfectly respectable.
Luckily for me, foreign exchange students receive more lenient grading: I call that the Foreigner Pity Grade Supplement. That means that occasionally, I’m in the position of having received the highest grade in the class, even if I’m not sure if the ideas I put forth in my composition (or whatever) merit it. This happened, for example, in a course about territorial development: I wrote a bang-up book review, studied reasonably hard (for an exchange student), and received a 13.5. When I shared this with a reasonably close French friend, her mouth went agape. Since then, for social reasons, I’ve been saying I received an 11.
Imagine that: being embarrassed to have received a 67%!
But it’s my mark in Glaciers that embarrasses me most, and it’s embarrassing in the opposite direction. Even by French standards, this is dismal. Hold yourself down: I received a 3. That’s a 15%.
The problem is that this makes no mathematical sense. The final grade was calculated as the average of the conference grade and the final exam grade. Let’s make like this is math class: I received a 7.2 in the conference, so what grade must I have received on the exam to have received a 3 in the course?
Give up? The answer is -1.5.
So something is fishy. The French students who I told about this told me laughed and told me it wasn’t possible to receive a negative grade. Today I went to the department secretary for further confirmation: she agreed, a -1.5 was probably not plausible, but that she, of course, was not the one to talk to about this grade.
So I’m at a crossroads. I can either pursue this matter with the professor in order to get my grade raised by probably some one or two points, which would still put me in the realm of failing. Or I can let this slide and content myself with the knowledge that as a Canadian Urban Systems major, I’ll probably never have to take a class about glaciers again.
In Canada I’d content myself with the knowledge that this was probably just some quick little mistake; the wrong bubble filled in on the Scantron sheet. But having gone through an entire semester with this conference professor, I feel like it could just as well be malicious. She’s the one, after all, who mocked me at the first class for being foreign. (”Is that how you take notes in Canada?” she said in front of an entire class.)
There are two latent desires which are currently duking it out in my head. On the one hand, I would be perfectly happy to never deal with her again; I wish her well, I hope her rock chemistry research makes her very happy, but that I have no part in it. But on the other hand, I’m angry enough that I do, in a way, want to stick it to her. My French may be imperfect, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.