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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Every Grade Counts!


We’ve all heard that every vote counts. The truth of this doesn’t really hit you until you see that in Minnesota Al Franken won by 343 votes. That’s not a lot. 343. That means that if every single person who is stuffed into the building 6 first floor ladies room when classes change were to vote for the other guy he would have won.  My own grandfather lost a local election in Champagne, Illinois by one vote. Just one.  And it was his own. He felt it would be rude to vote for himself. (I come from a very self-effacing family!)

Grades are the same as votes. Every single one counts. Missing grades will not cost us an election but, in these perilous financial times, will cost us something just as precious, state funding.  Our portion of state funding is determined by the full-time equivalent total of all our registered students. More students equal more state funds. Makes sense. But, even if a student is enrolled from day one of the semester, they will not be counted for state funding unless they have a final grade. Ouch.

I’ll let someone in the Math Department do the math but let’s just imagine if each course taught this semester has one single student without a grade.  That’s a lot of students who we can’t count even though they were registered. We typically end up with 5% of our 19,000 students without a grade. R&R works diligently to track these down but getting the grade months after the report goes to the state doesn’t help. And some grades are never turned in, which upsets graduation certification as well as suspension, probation and MCC’s income from state funding.

So remember, don’t leave any students ungraded at the end of the semester. Every missing grade costs us money and causes a problem with the student’s academic record. Every grade counts!

Deborah Benjamin
Registration and Records
05/13/2009