Students and Professors, what moment made you want to rage quit college?

I got a failing score on a lab report, even though me and the rest of the group thought that we did everything in the rubric.

We went to our teacher assistant's office hours later to ask about the score.

She basically reversed all the subtracted points because she was taking off points for things we had done correctly.

The next year, one of my lab mates got a grading position with that TA, and she admitted to him that halfway through the year she stopped paying attention to the reports and just assigned random scores.

I mean, what the frick. This is a college-level course for our major. You can't do that?

How can a teacher's assistant be okay with doing that to other students? And how didn't

the professor catch on? You'd think there'd be many complaints from the students.

I think many TAs think of T-Aing as this unpleasant thing that they're forced to do that no one

really cares about the outcomes of, and they think of the money from TAing,

as something completely unrelated. They aren't necessarily wrong to think this either,

since at many universities, TA positions are essentially guaranteed to grad students,

so there's no real consequences of doing a bad job. As for how the professor didn't catch on,

well, if nobody complains to them and they have no way of knowing.

Most students are really timid about complaining about their marks, and the ones who do like to

complain about marks are often pretty frivolous about it. It's surprising what a TA can get away with.

Usually, when you take any kind of math-oriented exam, like math, physics or mechanics,

you get a pack of

problems slapped on your desk and you finish it in the time allotted. So you can generally

blow through 90% of a test and get stuck on one difficult part for the remainder, or just have

that aha moment at the end to squeeze in a few extra points. But this one guy had the bright idea

of handing out and collecting each problem at 15

...