The situation
I'm a PhD student and serve as an assistant to several courses. Now, the students were complaining that some rules of our course are not good for them - there are some restriction what has to be achieved in order to participate in the final exam, e.g.
- they need a certain amount of credits in their homework,
- everybody who has failed that course in the years before, have the get the credits for their homework again.
You have freedom in chosing the threshold, but the rules are written in the examination regulations (I'm also a member of the that examination committee) that is not the problem.
There are some professors in my department who don't follow that rules; or (even) worse come up with some funny new rules contradicting the rules (like (you don't have to read this to answer the question) If you have 50% of the credits until the third to last week of the semester, you are able to participate in the final exam. If you pass, you pass. If you fail, you are only allowed to participate in the repetition of the final exam if you have 50% of your credits in the last week of the semester).
The problem
Apart from them violating the rules, the problem is now that students come to my course and say: "Hey, professor XX did not have the rules last year. Why do you have them? That is so unfair! And you can have it, too! Because, nobody complained last year! Cmon, we will not tell anyone!".
As soon as I hear something like that, I complain. The problem is then: No student would tell someone things like that (exept in the mentioned case when they try to convince me to do it that way, too); the professors are sometimes not informed, but also sometimes aware of that und don't write anything on their course homepage. So nobody can find out. If you find out (probably at the end of the semester), it is too late and if you want to declare that course as not following the rules, you are only damaging the students of that course.
I was talking to the responsible persons in my department; they see the problem, but they don't want to have fights within the department and they don't to establish automatic announcements from the professors what the rules for their course are.
The question
What can I do against it? The atmosphere in my course was very bad because of that. I could go to the head of the faculty or the university who will end all that, but then I fair to be an abandoned person in my department. Also, I want not to damage students and declare their passed exams as illegal.