You guys will love this...

[ctumbleweed]

I have to agree with bawhitsett on this topic. Professors have to make their expectations clear at the start of the course. Unfortunately, even when expectations are made clear and repeated multiple times in class announcements and e-mail (from my personal experience), there are students who ignore the requirements and stay in the class. This has a negative impact on the rest of the students who have chosen to meet the challenge of the course. I don't have experience with Graduate level online classes. However, my negative experience was with an undergraduate online course when a couple of students were unwilling or unable to meet the challenge of an online course. These students were repeatedly late on assignments, quizzes, midterm, and final which meant that the entire class of 35+ had to wait for the professor to post answers and grades, two weeks for the midterm. It is kind of agonizing to have to repeatedly wait for grades, especially when many of us on this forum are used to the instant gratification of seeing our scores immediately after taking a Clep or Dantes. I had the unfortunate experience of being assigned a group paper with one of the slackers in that online class. When he finally turned in his portion on the morning the assignment was due while the rest of the group finished the weekend before so that we could review it, I ended up taking the day off from work to edit his section because most of it was plagiarized (thank goodness for plagiarism checkers!), there were no references (required for the assignment), and it was full of grammatical and spelling errors! So after my bad experience, I would prefer that students drop out if not prepared so that the rest of the class doesn’t have to suffer. Maybe the Marketing professor had become somewhat cynical and I could understand that if students repeatedly were not prepared for the challenge of the course when upfront, even if somewhat harsh, about it at the beginning.

So bmills072200, try to look at it as the professor doing you a favor by weeding out the students who aren’t up for the challenge. Hang in there, you’re almost there!