Student finally receives grade for class taken in 2015

By Derek Baker, January 9 2017 —

As the remaining grades from the Fall 2017 semester trickle in, many students are anxiously checking myUofC to see whether they have been posted. But one student’s patience has been tested in particular.

After waiting for two years, fourth-year open studies student Joel Johnston finally received his final grade for HTST 351. He took the class in Fall 2015, along with a cohort of classmates who gave up hope long ago.

“I have been incessantly checking D2L and the myUofC grades page every waking minute,” Johnston said. “I have not ate, drank or slept for two years. All I did was refresh the page — over and over and over again.”

Johnston went on to explain that he was too nervous to email his professor to ask why there was a delay in posting the grade, fearing that it may come across as unnecessary pestering.

“I mean, the final was just a multiple choice test on a Scantron. All you have to do is feed it through the machine,” Johnston said. “But professors are infallible, right? Surely, there has to be a reason for the hold-up.”

Johnston’s history professor, 67-year-old Cameron Charles, does not know why it took so long for the grades to be posted. However, he apologizes for the delay.

“There’s a ‘publish grades’ button on the D2L webpage shell doohickey. I don’t know what it does,” Charles said in an email that signed off with “sent from my Nokia N70.”

While he was waiting for the grade, Johnston remained enrolled in classes. He said whenever he received a class announcement, the red notification dot on D2L would bring a false sense of hope.

“Every time that dot popped up, I finally thought, ‘This is it! This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.’ I’d nervously hover over the notification panel, too afraid to click it,” he said. “Alas, it was never the notification I longed for. It was normally just a pointless notification from the general faculty shell.”

Like Pavlov’s dog, Johnston has been conditioned so that even just the sight of the colour red makes his heart stop for a brief moment.

“Cherries are the worst, man. I can’t even look at them anymore,” he said.

When he finally received his grade, Johnston said that he got a C- in the class. Regardless, he is glad to finally have closure.

This article is part of our Humour section.