It’s a situation professors faces every semester or two. A student’s grandparent passes away and they have to leave for the funeral. When this happens around exam time, it creates a difficult situation for students. And it also creates an awkward situation for faculty: prove to us that Nana passed away. It makes me feel like a jerk to ask this of my students, but I have a responsibility to do it.

Some students volunteer the information. Last semester a student brought me the funeral program so that I could verify that he indeed went to a funeral and had a legitimate excuse. He offered to do this when he told me about the situation initially, so I didn’t have to ask him the awkward question, and that made me feel better about the whole thing. But I need some kind of proof because the facts are: 1) grandparents die, and 2) some students lie.

When I was teaching at St. Louis University while in graduate school, I had a principles class one summer. I had a student in that class who had taken the same class with me the previous semester and failed it. I don’t know why she was taking it with me again instead of with another professor, but that was her call. Anyway, she did poorly on the midterm exam and was not doing well on her homework assignments. She had a C-/D+ going into the final exam, which was going to make or break her grade. And wouldn’t you know it, the night before the final exam, her grandma got sick.

I receive an e-mail from her at around 10pm the night before the final exam saying that her grandmother was admitted to a hospital in Cape Girardeau (over 100 miles from St. Louis). She has to leave first thing in the morning to be by her bedside, so she won’t be able to take the final exam. She doesn’t know how long she’ll have to be down in Cape, so she wants to know how I will handle the situation. I tell her that I’ll give her one week to take the final exam. If she can’t do that, then I’ll just have to give her a grade of “incomplete,” allowing her to take the final exam the next semester in someone else’s class. Sure enough, as I expected, the week goes by and she doesn’t take the exam.

When I get the e-mail, I know it’s a lie. I just feel it in my gut. So after her week passes, I go to the registrar’s office in the business school and talk to the person behind the counter there. I explain that I have a strong suspicion this is a lie and I want to ask for proof of the situation before I just give her an incomplete, but I’m not sure if I’m even allowed to or how I am supposed to go about it. They tell me that I should tell this student that in order for them to process the incomplete, the registrar’s office needs proof of the situation. Bingo! I get to blame it on the administration. Perfect.

I e-mail her and say that the registrar’s office needs some kind of proof — a hospital record, an admissions receipt, something, anything, to confirm this, or I will have to give her an F instead of the incomplete she wants. I give her 30 days. I remind her 3 weeks later. I get nothing. I gave her the F. She never disputed it.

Bottom line: I called her bluff and she folded. There was no sick grandmother. I didn’t even know her grandmother’s name — she could have given me something from any woman admitted to any hospital in Cape Girardeau and I would have taken it. My gut was right.

That’s why your professors ask you for proof that your relative died. It’s awkward and we don’t want to do it, but we have to do it because some of your classmates lie and cheat and we don’t want to be taken advantage of. In addition, it’s not fair to the rest of you who study your butts off before an exam you wish you had more time to study for. You suck it up, study hard and try your best, and we thank you for that. We have a duty to make sure that others don’t get bailed out by lying.

So if you are unfortunate enough to have a loved one pass away at an inconvenient time, before an exam or paper is due, make it easy on both you and your professors. Tell them you will bring proof, and then follow up and bring that proof. (If you forget amidst all the turmoil, please don’t be offended if we ask you for it.) It will let us know that you understand that the situation is difficult for both of us, and that you’re not lying about anything. And it will restore a little of our faith in our students.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from our union telling us that it looks like the state’s budget deficit next year will be less than expected. But what caught my eye was something about Pell grants. I mentioned in a previous post that the maximum Pell grant award would increase by $500. What I did not know, and what this e-mail informed me of, is that the State of Minnesota deducts Pell grant awards from state grant eligibility. The state is viewing this as a big windfall: a boatload of money (estimated at $69 million) students used to receive from the state grant fund will now come from the federal government instead, so the state can use that money somewhere else. Our union hopes it stays in our budget to prevent other funding cuts, but some of it is likely to go to other areas of the state budget.

For students, this basically means that if you were receiving both state grants and Pell grants, your total grant may very well remain unchanged: Pell grants go up, state grants go down by the exact amount. Bummer. Just thought you should know before you head out to your Spring Break destination thinking you have an extra $500 to blow.

Earlier this week I discussed a conversation I had with a student. I wasn’t sure if I should write about it publicly, but I thought as long as I didn’t mention any names, it would be okay. I do not know if the student has read it, but I hope that if he does he focuses on my final message for him about being open-minded in his pursuit of knowledge. I shared it here because I think it’s useful for students to see what their professors go through sometimes. Professors have all been students, so we have some idea of things from their side of the classroom, but students rarely know the kinds of things their professors go through during the course of a semester. I had another unique situation about a year ago that I thought I would share.

A student e-mailed me on a Saturday evening before the coming Tuesday’s midterm exam (the first of two that semester). She informed me that she had just been informed that a good friend of hers had passed away the day before. She was having a very hard time dealing with it and did not think she would be able to take the midterm exam and wanted to know what her options were. She thought there might be a chance she could pull through, but wanted to know what to do in case she just couldn’t make it.

Now, if you’ve been in one of my classes, you know I really dislike letting students take exams late and have an almost iron-clad policy against it. I do not like the idea of one student having access to the brains of many other students who have already taken the exam, any one of which can tell her what was on the exam. In large principles classes, I write two versions of the exam with different questions, and I alternate them when I place them on students’ desks so that no two adjacent students have the same exam. It cuts down on the incentive to try to cheat. After grading, I weigh the exams differently if the averages are different — I can’t guarantee that the two exams will be of the same difficulty when I write them since I don’t use multiple choice questions and require explanations for all answers, and sometimes one exam is just a little harder than the others. For the second midterm, I use performance on the first midterm as an explanatory variable and run a least-squares regression to isolate the different effects of the two exams, giving me a pretty good idea of whether they were of equal difficulty or not. So having already created two exams, I really don’t want to write a third exam and I can’t guarantee it’s the same level of difficulty since there is not a whole classroom taking it to give me an overall average. When a student knows they will not be able to take the exam on the scheduled day, I let them take it early. But when a student misses an exam because of a valid emergency (i.e. they were just hit by a car), that option is not available. In those cases, I think the fairest thing to do is to weigh their other exams more.

This is also what I do when a student adds a class late and has missed an online assignment. I can’t just excuse them from that assignment because they added late. I can’t give them a zero — that is not fair to the student. And I can’t just give them 100% either — that’s  unfair to the students who took it and did not do well on it. So I give them the average of all the other online assignments. There’s no perfect solution, but that’s what I think is the most fair thing I can do.

Back to the story. I tried to come up with the best possible solution to her situation and e-mailed her that night. (I really wish I had the e-mail I sent her because I re-wrote it several times to make sure I struck a good, compassionate tone, and I was actually very happy with the result. But my computer at work was wiped clean a few months ago, so I lost it.) I told her that I was sorry for her loss and I understood how she might not be able to study for the exam given the circumstances. I told her that if she could not take the exam, I would just weigh her other exams more, basically giving her the average grade of her other two exams as her grade for this exam. I gave her another option as well. I told her that if she could manage to study and take the exam on Tuesday as scheduled, I would let her make a choice at that time: if she didn’t think she did well on it, I wouldn’t even grade it and I would just go with the original solution. This way she had nothing to lose by taking the exam, and hopefully she might give it a shot. I finished the e-mail by saying that this was what I came up with, but if she could come up with another solution, she should let me know and we could discuss it.

My e-mail went unanswered and the midterm came and went. Two weeks later, she came into my office, asked if we could talk, and shut the door behind her. I got up out of my chair, went to the door and opened it a crack. There’s no official school policy on this, but I dislike having the door closed when I have a student alone with me in my office, just to avoid any possible appearance of impropriety.

She told me that she did not like my solution to her situation and needed to bring that fact to my attention. She said that it ultimately wasn’t a huge problem for her because she was a senior, she didn’t really need the class, and she could always just drop it. But she wanted to talk to me on behalf of other students I might have in the future who have a situation similar to hers. She said that it was very unfair that I do not let students take a late exam. I explained what I have outlined four paragraphs above. She said that I wouldn’t have had to worry about her finding out what was on the exam because she didn’t know anyone in the class and, even if she did, she wouldn’t ask them what was on the exam. I have no way of knowing if either of those statements is in fact true, so it’s not something I can rely upon when making a decision like this. She said that if I was not going to allow students to take late exams, I should come up with something else.

I posed a hypothetical situation to her: the morning of the next midterm exam, a student is hit by a car and cannot take the exam either that day or for the next few weeks — what should I do for the student in that situation? She suggested I have the student write a paper. I’m not sure how I would have a student write a paper on so many different topics covered on the exam (PPF, supply and demand, price controls, taxes, elasticity, and measurement of macroeconomic variables), but that’s beside the point. I told her I did not like that solution because exams and papers are completely different: taking an exam requires you to know information and be able to communicate it from memory; writing a paper requires you to know where to find information in a book, which is not even close to the same thing.

She ran out of possible solutions at that point, and I thought perhaps she would see things from my perspective. I was hoping she’d say, “You know, there really aren’t many good options in a situation like this, so I guess I understand your solution better now.”

Not so much. She went to plan B. She said that it wasn’t so much my proposed solution she had a problem with really. What bothered her even more was that I just wasn’t being sympathetic. She said that my e-mail to her was “cold.”

That’s where I got offended. As I have described already, I thought I was very sympathetic in my e-mail, and I actually pulled it up on my computer and read it aloud to her in my office. It said that I was sorry for her loss and I understood how she would probably not be able to take the exam. “That is ‘cold’ to you?” I asked her. And then as I was reading it verbatim to her, I realized something I had forgotten at the time: that I had actually ended my e-mail by telling her that if she could come up with another solution, she should let me know. But she never responded to me.

So I asked her what I was supposed to do in that situation. What was I supposed to do when I told a student I would be willing to entertain a different solution if she could come up with one, but that student never even responded to me? I’m not a mind-reader, a fact to which every woman I have ever been in a relationship with can attest. All she could say was that she thought I should have handled it differently.

I was done. I told her that I thought it would be best if she left my office immediately. I’ve never told a student they should leave my office before and I never thought I would. I love students — that’s why I’m a teacher. But at that point, I thought she was completely disrespecting me and my anger at being disrespected was escalating. I had made an effort to be sympathetic and work something out with her, and she accuses me of being cold and unsympathetic to her situation? I was not having any of it. Thankfully for both of us, she took my advice and left before I had to raise my voice.

I was so infuriated that I called my mother — I’m a momma’s boy, I know, so go ahead and make fun, I don’t care. She wasn’t home, but I talked to my stepfather who works for a hospice. He’s seen his share of people going through grief and he was able to put things in perspective for me. He explained that she had just lost a friend and didn’t really know how to deal with it. She was grieving and I just happened to be in the way. He told me not to take it personally, and at that point it was easier to detach myself from the situation and let it go.

After cooling down, I sent her an e-mail apologizing for losing my composure with her. I told her that I wasn’t sure what more I could have done for her about the exam, and that I was sorry she did not feel my solution was fair. But again, I asked her what I was supposed to do when I had asked her to propose another solution and she never responded to me. I told her that I hoped we could put this behind us and just let it go. She did not respond to that e-mail either, but she was in class the next day and most every day after that. We never discussed it and we never had another problem.

So why do I share this story? Hopefully students will learn something from it. This student did not understood things from my perspective at all. She did not appreciate the concerns I had with giving late exams or papers. She was not willing to look at things from my side at all. Hopefully the next time you have a situation that requires special attention from a professor of yours, you’ll take a step back and try to look at the situation objectively before becoming upset at your professor for not providing you the remedy of your choice.

This situation was a learning experience for me also. I learned that people sometimes act out of character when they are grieving or going through a difficult situation, and that sometimes no level of compassion will be ever enough to ease their pain. I’d like to think that knowing what I know now, I might have handled that situation a little bit differently and would not have been so upset; that I would have realized her grief and not taken her comments personally. If a situation like that happens in the future, I’ll know better how to handle it. People, like animals, sometimes lash out when they are wounded and defenseless. But that doesn’t mean you stop reaching out.

Yesterday I had one of the most surreal experiences I have had in my 10+ years of teaching university-level economics. I had a student come to my office to tell me he was dropping my class because of my politics. Well, actually, that’s not entirely correct, and it was more about his politics than mine, but it’s a long story and you’ll just have to keep reading. He told me that he was not really learning the material because during lecture he was too distracted by my political beliefs and he wanted to talk about it more in class but couldn’t. Every time I would talk about how a market outcome is good (maximizing the total surplus for society, in the absence of market failures of course), he wanted to give “the other side” to my class. When I showed that price controls result in inefficient outcomes, he wanted to rebut that, despite the fact that no argument he had could make could change the basic laws of supply and demand. I told him that I have to teach micro and micro in one semester in just 3 hours a week (more like 2.5 when you consider the in-class exercise) and it’s simply not possible to have debates about every little thing that pops into his head. I told him that this was an economics class, not a political science or sociology class, and I don’t have time to discuss all of those other related subjects. If I don’t get through everything I need to cover, I’m short-changing 70 students by not giving them the introduction to economics they paid for and deserve.

In the very first class, he wanted to discuss the Iraq war and how the economy would be better if we hadn’t gone. I’m perfectly fine with that question at some point in the class, but on the first day, the class as a whole does not have a solid economic foundation with which to analyze that issue. That’s why the students are taking the class – it is called Introduction to Economics, after all. We have to go through supply and demand, government intervention in markets, short-run and long-run output determination, interest rates and inflation, unemployment, budget deficits, exchange rates and a few other things before we can treat an issue like that responsibly. I am not going to just argue politics in an economics class — it’s inappropriate and, frankly, it’s one of the reasons why I have this blog. If students want to hear my political beliefs and where they come from, they can read in their own free time. But I’m not going to waste their time and money on political discussions in class that are not grounded in solid economic analysis. If he wants to come to office hours and debate me, I’m fine with that too. But I won’t waste my students’ valuable time talking politics  for politics’ sake– that’s why we have political science classes. I will talk about the economic effects of different public policy decisions, but only when we have established a sufficient framework for analyzing them, which is what I hopefully give them over the course of 15 weeks. I will give him credit though — he wanted to discuss things in greater detail, and I do appreciate that. I just did not have the time to discuss it to his satisfaction. And since he couldn’t get his opinion across to 69 other students to rebut me (because my saying that markets are efficient is apparently a highly inflammatory political statement) he decided to quit. His was evidently not a quest for knowledge or an exchange of ideas, but rather a quest for his opinion to be heard and for him to prove wrong anyone who disagrees with said opinion.

When I pressed him further about what exactly I was doing that he had a problem with, he reluctantly admitted that I presented the facts fairly, the “positive economics” as I have alluded to in earlier posts on this blog. But even though I allow my students to make any normative judgment they want, as long as they have facts behind them, that was not good enough for him. The fact that he knows that policies I would support (pro-market, anti-government intervention) are not the ones he would support was enough to keep him from being able to learn from me. It was too distracting for him. He asked me if I thought he would learn the material better from a more liberal professor. I had to laugh a little and I told him that this is principles of economics and what you get from every professor is going to be essentially the same. There is no liberal PPF and conservative PPF. But if he is so closed-minded that he can only learn from someone who has the same political beliefs, then maybe he should try that.

Since he had mentioned it, I asked him if he had any specific problem with the way I presented the material on price ceilings. The standard conclusion based on the supply and demand model we established already is that when you force prices down, you make the good less profitable for firms. So even though you may be trying to help consumers, some of them will be worse off because firms are not going to produce as much of the good as before: some consumers are left worse off than before because they can’t get the good at all. In fact, this is so standard that it’s actually what is in the textbook (Hubbard/O’Brien) that I use. It sums up price controls by saying that government intervention does three things: 1) makes some people better off, 2) makes other people worse off, and 3) decreases economic efficiency. Furthermore, I still always leave it to the students to decide for themselves if they agree with the policy or not, depending on a) whether they agree with government redistribution of income to begin with, b) how much economic inefficiency they are willing to deal with to support that redistribution of income, and finally c) whether they are part of the first group of people or the second group. I specifically left it an open-ended question in an in-class exercise a few weeks ago, and required them to justify their agreement or disagreement with the price control based on what part of it concerned them most. It was perfectly acceptable for students to support price controls saying that everyone should at least have a shot at a low price, even if it meant that some people, even perhaps some of the poor people that the program was intended to help, would be worse off than before. But if they were to write that a price control in a competitive market will not cause an inefficient level of output, that’s just plain wrong. (Caveat: if supply is perfectly inelastic and firms cannot reduce output at all, then economic efficiency does not suffer, but we didn’t get too far into elasticity in the intro class.)

His response to my presentation of price controls? ”I just think we should help people.” Great. If I had reacted the way I wanted to, I would have looked like this or this. Once again, I’m an evil conservative because I don’t want to “help people.” I told him that my responsibility in discussing price controls is to show what happens when you impose price ceilings and compare that to what happens when you leave the market alone – to look at the costs and benefits of both situations, and to show that “helping people” is not costless. He wants to focus on effect 1 but ignore effects 2 and 3, which is intellectually dishonest. While he’s at it, maybe he needs to find another textbook too, one that talks more about helping people and doesn’t bother with any mundane discussion of the costs of doing so. I think he can probably find one, but it won’t say “Economics” on the spine — it will say “Sociology” or “Social Work.” And fortunately for him, I don’t teach either of those.

The sad part is that he is the kind of student that really needs an economics class the most. He has ideas about the way the world should work but no framework for analyzing the costs of his ideas. And he thinks anybody who disagrees with him is wrong, regardless of any facts they might have to contradict his position. That is a dangerous combination.

He said that ultimately it was more about him than me. (He gave me the “It’s not you, it’s me” speech! I haven’t heard it in so long….) He said that maybe he was too immature and not ready to hear other people’s opinions. He said he was not really ready to be objective and just learn the material from me knowing what my political beliefs are. I wonder if he would be able to learn math from a professor who voted for Nixon. It seems that in his 19 or 20 years of life, he has so mastered the way the world works that he is not ready to hear any dissent from anyone. And why should he when we’re all wrong?  The debate is over! What do I know anyway? Who do I think I am teaching all this “established theory” in a way that might result in someone possibly coming to a conclusion that contradicts his established view of how the world should work?

This student said he was a political science major, which I think is probably the scariest piece of the puzzle. I personally think he’s in for a rude awakening if he is going to take political science classes and not be able to listen to people who disagree with him. He probably wants to shape public policy someday, apparently without any regard to the costs of his policies — as long as they “help people,” that’s good enough for him. I think he might be related to Charlie Crist (see this post).

I can’t imagine a world without people who don’t disagree with me. What fun is that? What intellectual challenge is that? Some of my favorite conversations at my last university (Go Wildcats!) were with an undergrad named Kari. She is so far to the political left that she once actually fell off the political spectrum. We had some heated discussions (never in class, btw) but they were always good-natured and we both enjoyed them, I think. We figured out exactly what each other’s points were, what was up for debate, and what was just based on a difference in priorities. In the end, after a spirited exchange, we usually agreed to disagree.  But I still wanted to hear what she had to say, even if it was just to see if I could rebut it to annoy her. I learned that skill from my brother.

I have changed my mind on many different topics since I went to college: abortion, the death penalty, even government funding for higher education. After Obama’s speech tonight, hearing him say that America can now proudly say we do not torture, I think I’m with him on that one too. And that’s a change for me – I used to be in favor of torturing the crap out of terrorists who do not play by Geneva Convention rules and do not deserve to be treated according to them. But I think I’ve switched my view on that.

My favorite professor in college was Dr. Martha Olney. She’s the reason I am where I am today. (Econ 472 students preparing for next week’s midterm: don’t blame me, blame Marty Olney.) I was a Legal Studies major, only taking her Economics 1 class because it was required. She was amazing and made it more interesting than any principles class has a right to be. If I had taken that class with another professor, I might be a lawyer right now. But she opened my eyes up to economics, so I added the major and eventually went to grad school so I could teach it. Marty is a liberal and had no problem telling students so because it didn’t really affect her teaching. She stuck to the theory, presented positive economics and allowed us to make the normative judgments ourselves, as long as they were based on solid positive analysis. She told us what she thought about public policy, and sure it was usually left-of-center, but we understood that was her informed opinion, and she always gave the other side too. The only time she annoyed me was when, the day after the Republicans took control of the House in 1994, she spent 5-10 minutes in Intermediate Macroeconomics talking about how horrible it was for America that the Republicans were in control. Her discussion was not limited to economic outcomes (is the end of the world an economic outcome?) but went to social issues as well, which I thought she had no business doing in an economics class, especially when half of the class had voted the day before for those evil Republican guys she was bashing so thoroughly. But the rest of the time, she taught economics wonderfully, I learned tons from her, and her political views were irrelevant. I still admire her and thank her for leading me down this path.

As a notetaker for Black Lightning at U.C. Berkeley, I had the pleasure of sitting in on about a dozen different economics professors teaching principles of economics courses, including Christina Romer, the head of Obama’s Economic Advisors. Not once did it matter what the person’s politics were — they all taught the same thing, just in slightly different ways, some more effectively than others. Sure, some emphasized government intervention more than others and mentioned what they believed politically, but they all presented the material fairly. I have picked and chosen from each of them different ways of teaching different topics, and I like to think that my students are getting a “Best of Berkeley” principles course. And the fact that this is the first time in over ten years that any student has complained about my politics is an indication to me that I’m also teaching it pretty fairly, sticking to the positive economics and letting students make their own normative judgments. It’s sad that a student is so blinded by his own political ideology that he cannot even listen to a professor discuss average variable cost curves because he knows that professor’s political beliefs are contrary to his own. There is plenty of reason to hate AVC curves on their own merit — you don’t need to bring politics into it.

Final note: it takes some level of self-awareness for someone to say that they are not mature enough right now to be objective about a situation and need to work on that, and that at least gives me some modicum of hope for this student. May his journey in college force him to open his mind and take in as much knowledge as he can, regardless of the source from which it comes.

And as I always say, if you don’t listen to those with whom you disagree, how will you ever know just how wrong they really are?

This morning I received a call from a reporter at UTVS asking if I could comment on the ways in which the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the “stimulus” bill) will affect students. Here is what I was able to determine, which I discussed in the interview.

1. Pell grant maximums increase by $500 per year.

2. Stafford loan maximums increase by $2,000 per year.

3. The Hope Education Credit, which gives you tax credits for money spent on tuition and education-related expenses, is much more accessible to a broad range of students than it used to be. In the past, it was only accessible to the truly middle-class — poor people could not claim it because they did not pay taxes, and individuals making more than $48,000 could not claim the full amount, while those making over $58,000 (or families making more than $116,000) could not claim anything at all. The credit has changed in a few important ways.

a. The maximum amount of the Hope tax credit has increased from $1,800 to $2,500 per year. (Note: you have to spend $4,000 on education to get the maximum $2,500 in tax credits; it covers the first $1,200 you spend dollar for dollar, and beyond that you get $.50 back for every dollar spent, up to the maximum tax credit of $2,500.)

b. The income level at which the phase-out of the credit begins increased from $58,000 to $80,000, and on married couples from $94,000 to $160,000. At $90,000 for individuals or $180,000 for married couples, Hope cannot be claimed at all.

c. In the past, the tax credit was not refundable. This meant that if you had Hope tax credits of $1,000 but only owed $200 in income taxes because your income was relatively low, the credit would wipe out that $200 you owed but you could not actually get $800 cash back. If you were poor enough to have no income tax liability at all, Hope was worthless to you. Now 40% of the credit is refundable — so if you have tax liability anywhere from $0 to $1,500, and you meet the full $2,500 credit limit, you can get $1,000 cash back.  (Can you say Spring Break trip, anyone? Just make sure you go somewhere in the U.S. to keep the stimulus in our economy. There’s already enough stimulus at Spring Break in Cancun.)

Overall, I was happy with the portion of the interview that UTVS showed on their news program tonight. But after the reporter’s clip was finished, the broadcaster said that Professor Switzer had additional advice for students — that they should consider filing as an individual taxpayer if their parents make less than $58,000 per year. That was pretty much the opposite of what I actually said in the interview.  The $58,000 figure was incorrect on my part (since now the relevant income level for individuals is actually $80,000). But the broadcaster should have said that you should consider filing individually if your parents make more than this income level, not less. Let me clarify:

If a student’s parents make more than $160,000, they will not be able to claim the full tax credit (and if they make more than $180,000 they will get nothing from Hope), while the student would receive the full credit if their income is less than $80,000, which it likely is. Since the benefit to rich families from being able to claim a child as a deduction is $3,500, and the marginal tax rate at an income of $160,000 is 33%, that’s a cash benefit of $1,155 if parents can claim the child. That’s better than the $1,000 cash back students filing individually would get if they have no tax liability at all – but not as good as the potential $2,500 savings if a student does actually have some tax liability and can use the full credit to reduce their taxes owed. If a student’s parents do not make more than $160,000, the parents can get the entire $2,500 credit even if they claim the child as a dependent, and the amount of benefit from the child deduction probably means they should just go ahead and claim the student. So to clarify, students should consider filing individually if a) their parents make over $160,000 and b) students actually have some positive income, enough to owe more than a few hundred dollars in income taxes. Even then, there are other things to consider — but when Charlie Rangel, the Congressman in charge of the tax code, can’t figure out his own taxes, don’t feel too bad if you can’t figure it out either.

If you are one of the vast majority of students (who do not have income tax liability and whose parents do not make more than $160,000), if your parents are claiming you now, let them keep on claiming you and Hope they give you some of this extra $700.

Before the Fall 2008 semester, I had the opportunity to be part of the First Year Experience (FYE) program. I was part of the “Professor’s Perspective,” where professors talk about what we do, what we expect from students, and how college is different from high school. A lot of it has to do with things that high school students just don’t know. College is a different culture and schools can be different. When I was an undergrad at Berkeley, we called all of our professors “Professor.” In grad school at WashU, we called them all “Doctor.” Some of this is institutional. Some of it is just plain common sense, if you think about things from a professor’s perspective.

Preparing for my lecture, I decided to speak with my colleagues about what they would like incoming freshmen to know. Here are a few suggestions for students based on those conversations with my colleagues.
1. Address your professor as “Professor X” (X = last name) unless she tells you otherwise. You can call her Doctor X, too — that’s always nice. If she tells you that you can address her by her first name, then feel free to do so. (Note: if she signs her e-mails with her first name, that is not an invitation to call her by her first name — I don’t sign my e-mails “Dr. Switzer” and don’t really know many professors that do. I personally don’t mind if students feel comfortable enough with me that they call me Dave; other professors loathe it.) Never ever ever call her Mrs. X or Ms. X. We worked hard for our PhDs. Well, maybe we didn’t all work hard, but we worked for a long time on them anyway. We earned that doctorate. Respect us enough to honor that.

2. Proper e-mail ettiquette can go a long way. Unfortunately, most students have grown up with instant messaging and no longer know where the Shift key is located on the keyboard. Maybe we shouldn’t, but we take it as a sign of disrespect when you address us at the same level you would address someone you just met in a chat room. If you send me an e-mail, you should do a few things. (I think these hold for a lot of professors, and you can never go wrong by being too formal).

- First, start it with “Dr. Switzer” or “Hi, Dr. Switzer.” — something along those lines. Don’t start with “Hey, dude.” I’ve received that e-mail before. I’m not a dude. I’m your professor.

- Second, get to the point. Think about what you’re going to say and say it as succinctly as you can. You have 4 or 5 professors, so communicating with them may not seem like a burden on you. We have over 100 students, so we like to save time whenever possible.

- Third, use proper grammar, spelling and punctuation. Capitalize the first word of a sentence. Don’t use abbreviations like “c u l8r” or “wtf was up with ur lecture 2day?”

- Fourth, if your e-mail requires a response and you get one in a very timely manner, send back a quick thank you. It shows us that you acknowledge that we’re going above and beyond for you, trying to be helpful. And we like being appreciated for the work we put in. We won’t think you’re a suck-up — we’ll think you’re one of the few students who really understands just how much we care about helping our students.

3. RTFS. Read the freakin’ syllabus. It costs you virtually nothing to fire off an e-mail asking when the final exam is or when the homework is due. (Hint: go to the SCSU main page, click on “current students” then click “academic calendar” and click on the “final exams” link to find out when your exam is.) The majority of questions students ask are actually in the syllabus. We wrote it for a few reasons. One of those was so that we wouldn’t have to answer the same question from 30 different students about how much of the course grade the homework assignments are worth.

That’s about it for now. I could go on and on but I have the feeling if I did, you’d think I was a grumpy old man. I’m not. The vast majority of the time, this job is the best job in the world and I feel lucky to have it. As professors, we want to know that you’re taking your education seriously. And treating your professors with a little bit of respect makes us think you do that. And when we have students that we feel are taking our classes seriously, 90% of us will bend over backwards to help them. Some day you’ll need a letter of recommendation for grad school or a scholarship or something. When that day comes, you’ll be glad you were friendly and respectful to your professors. I know I’m not writing a letter for the guy who sent me the “Hey, Dude” e-mail any time soon.

Update: I almost forgot one more good thing not to do. If you miss class, never e-mail your professor and ask, “Did I miss anything important today?” That makes me want to answer, “No, you missed nothing of consequence whatsoever. I stood up in front of the class and rambled for 50 minutes about complete nonsense, none of which will ever be useful to you in this class or in life overall.” Hopefully you’ll pick up on the sarcasm and not e-mail me back and say, “Okay, good.” If you miss class, it is your responsibility to get notes from another student. If you have a nice professor, you may take a stab at asking if he/she can tell you what you missed. But don’t ask if it was important. For us, it’s all important, whether you see it that way or not.