​​​​Dr. Stephanie Smith

I teach many courses, have many advisees, oversee all psychology internships, and work on independent research with numerous students. As you can imagine, this can result in me receiving a LARGE number of emails on any given day. Sometimes, the emails I receive are of high importance and require my immediate attention. Other times, I receive emails that could have been avoided with a little foresight. Thus, we arrive at this list of things you should NOT email me about...

 

1. Grades. I cannot discuss your grades over email due to FERPA. If you want to know grades for specific assignments, you can find those on Connect. You are encouraged to keep up with your own grades as your overall grade is not shown on Connect. If you want to know your overall grade or wish to discuss your grade(s) with me, please make an appointment.

 

2. Explaining a topic you don't understand. It can be very hard to explain some topics via email and this also takes a lot of time. If you have questions about anything we cover in class, see me after class or make an appointment.

 

3. Telling me you are going to be absent or have to leave early. You do not need to email me to tell me that you are going to miss a class. You cannot make up any participation credit that you miss, so there is no need to inform me that you will not be present. You should, however, check in with other students in the class to get the notes that you missed after you return. The only exception to this is if your absence will occur during an exam.

 

5. You are having technical issues with any of the online components of the course. I am not tech support. However, each of the platforms utilized in this course do have tech support that can help solve any problems you are having using these sites. If you are concerned that your technical issue is going to impact your grade, you can send me a screenshot of the issue, a short description, and a case number showing that you have already spoken with the tech support for that respective platform.

 

6. Anything that can be found in the syllabus. Always, always, always check the syllabus before you send an email to any professor. If your question is about class policies, exams, grading, assignments, due dates, etc. there is a high likelihood that that information is contained in the syllabus already.

 

If you email me about any issue contained on this list, if you receive a reply at all it will simply be a link back to this list for you to review.