I swear, for such a “prestigious” institute of higher learning the Art Institute of Pittsburgh sure hires inadequate professors. It seems like every other instructor I get is either incompetent in their field, dang near an absentee instructor, or both!

For those of you who do not know me personally, I’m receiving my B.S. in Interactive Media and Web Design and will soon be receiving my M.S. in Educational Technology. I have been designing and developing websites professionally for a few years now and love, almost, every minute of it. I also privately tutor a few adults in web design for a nominal fee. So, as anyone can see, I’m quite experienced in web design!

I was enrolled in a Web Development course as part of my B.S. degree program. Unfortunately when I applied to Ai back in 2005 I was unaware of the opportunity to be given “Life Credit” for degree courses. So, I go ahead and decide to take it easy during this course considering the subject matter was very basic for my experience.

I used one of my current client’s websites as my final project to be completed during the course. I chose to go with The Wheelchair Shop’s website since I had the majority of the graphics and the copy well organized. The project went well and I completed it without any issues… or so I thought…

At the completion of the course I went to review my grade and the instructors’ final comments on my project… lo and behold, what I saw did not make me too happy.

She gave me a “B” for my final grade… a “B!”

I’m sorry, but as a professional, I found this hard to believe so I examined my grades for the final week.

Ah ha!

I see the problem… she only gave me 4 out of 32 points for my final project… but why?!

Upon examining my professors’ comments regarding my project my shock soon turned into fury.

The professor never even looked over my project… she graded it based on her personal feelings towards me. I have no clue why she disliked me but she seemed to have taken an instant disliking to me the first week of class. Maybe she was jealous, I don’t know.

To show you all that I’m not just nuts, I’ll include her comments regarding my project along with my email to her:

Comments:
Unfortunately you didn’t meet the requirements for this assignment. I know you are designing to your own standards, but this class is designed to meet specific goals. It’s ok to create a site for a client in this class as long as you meet the criteria for the grading assignments. Created animated GIF or Flash and incorporated it appropriately into the Web page. 0 out of 12 Integrated table as an element of one page. 0 out of 8 Included outside links page with appropriate links and descriptions to external Web sites. 0 out of 8 Published to site with no errors in functionality. 4

My email to my professor, with a CC to my Academic Advisor:

Unfortunately you have not fully viewed my project in its entirety.

You gave me 0 out of 12 points for the lack of an animation in Flash or GIF format. You also gave me 0 out of 8 points for not including outside relevant links on a page.

If you had reviewed my entire project at the time of grading you would have seen that the confirmation page included an animation and 4 external links to other relevant websites. I know you did not go through my contact form and reach the confirmation page because I would have received the form submission from you. My forms record IP addresses. The only form submissions I received during week 5 and 6 were from the two students who critiqued my project, Jesus Ramirez and Christopher Mararac. You would have had to go through my contact form to reach it since it is not linked on the sitemap.html.

To make things easier I am including the direct link to the confirmation page that you would have seen had you submitted the contact form: /WheelchairShop/confirmation.html

You also gave me 0 out of 8 points for not integrating a table into one of the pages of the website. If you viewed my source code from the beginning of this project, week 2, you would have seen a table on the very first page, index.html. To make things easier I am inserting a screen view of the source code of the page in question:

The link to that direct page is the first page you saw when you pulled up my project: /WheelchairShop/index.html

I’m sorry if my project isn’t like the other students but unlike the majority of them I design my work using CSS and xhtml, not a tables layout which is outdated and no longer recommended by the W3C. I know these students are not all that experienced but I had hoped, and actually expected, this course to push CSS layouts and not encourage tables to be used for layouts. A handful used CSS to position their DIVs and elements, however most used tables with fixed widths which are inaccessible in today’s modern times.

I will appreciate you taking the time to recheck my grade and my project. As you can see from what I pointed out, I did in fact follow the guidelines of the project grading criteria.

After about a week waiting for her reply, she finally revised my grade without so much as an apology. My grade went from an 83.13% to a 95.59%.

My next class is Media Law & Ethics… another class I am all too familiar with regarding subject matter.

Let’s hope the next professor is more competent because the Web Development professor was such a schmegege!