The students in University of Colorado associate professor Lee Chambers’ women’s history course will receive final grades in the class, despite having been told they would only get incomplete marks after a teaching assistant’s computer — which contained the students’ grades — crashed last week.
“We are working on this and will make it right for the students,” Boulder campus spokesman Bronson Hilliard said Friday. “We are delaying the submission of any kind of grade at all until we know if the data will be recovered.
“The students will not be receiving an incomplete in the class.”
Hilliard said the university strongly discourages faculty from using personal computers to keep track of grades. He also said the course’s instructor should not have told the approximately 70 students they would receive incomplete grades, since that is not university policy.
Chambers, who was not available for comment Friday, is working closely with the university’s information technology department, which is trying to recover data from the TA’s laptop — the only place the class’ grades were stored.
CU technicians are confident they can recover at least some of the necessary information, Hillard said.
Students in the class are expected to receive an e-mail explaining the situation, Hilliard added.
