Q:

Professor gave me a higher grade than I deserved. What should I do?

During one of my undergraduate semesters I was pretty depressed (for various personal reasons) and was struggling with completing my coursework. One class in particular didn't have a final exam, there was a just a final essay to turn in worth 25% of the grade. I was really out of it, and in the end I couldn't meet the deadline and didn't even turn it in, I was so unable to concentrate that I was willing to just accept my fate.
For whatever reason, my professor gave me a B- in the class, which is just impossible. Though I did do reasonably well on the rest of the coursework, the highest I could've gotten was 75%, not to mention if there was some bigger penalty that my university had for not attending/doing a final assignment (like getting an incomplete or something, I have no idea). It's unlikely the class was curved that much either...I don't know whether it was a grading entry error, whether the prof accidentally swapped my grade with another person's, or if she just took pity on me (I had mentioned that I was going through some personal issues when I turned in an assignment late during the semester), but for whatever reason I got a B-.
At the time, I was surprised and just accepted it. But as I started to feel better I felt extremely guilty about not turning in the essay, and months later (I've since graduated) I sent my professor an email with the paper attached basically saying "Really sorry I didn't turn it in, I was feeling depressed at the time, I should've turned it in back then, here it is", to which she just hasn't responded. I'm fairly certain she doesn't care at all, but it's been bothering me for a while now.
I'm not sure what to do - should I turn myself in to the school? I feel guilty about the whole thing, but what's worrying me as well is that I also don't want this to bite me in the ass down the line later in life. Can I be punished for not turning the essay, or not telling my professor the grade might have been too high?  Was it a mistake to email my professor at all afterwards, maybe I'm causing a problem for her? All in all, I'm really not sure what to think or do. 

A:

Don't worry about it. No one's going to come after you for failing to turn in an essay in some random course. No one's ever going to check and, if they did, they probably won't care too much. 
Should you turn yourself in? No. There's absolutely no reason to turn yourself in. You've done nothing wrong. The professor is the one responsible for assigning your grade correctly. For all you (or we) know, they felt you deserved a B-.
Should you have emailed your professor the essay? Probably not, but mostly because they probably don't care. I doubt they read it and I very much doubt that you caused any problems for them.

A:

As others have said, professors have a lot of flexibility in assigning grades.
It's not unusual for professors to have a policy of dropping a worst assignment and averaging the rest.  I've even seen this on final exams ("Happy with your grade going into the final?  Don't take it." or the variant "If you have an 'A' going into the final, you don't have to take it.").
If your professor had any clue that your outside-class troubles were preventing you from doing the final project, it's quite possible that she elected to use such a calculation for your scores, even if she wasn't doing so class-wide.  While at first glance this may seem unfair to other students, remember that the goal is to accurately evaluate your mastery of the material, not to make you do busy-work, and there's much more information about your performance in the assignments you did turn in than the ones after you got distracted.  The principle of "measure mastery, not busywork" appears in other ways too, such as credit-by-examination.
Your late submission of the assignment isn't likely to result in any sort of regrade, assuming the professor is comfortable with the calculation she used.  She might read it if she's interested, and your diligence in following up could lead to benefits beyond the course grade (recommendation letter, for example), but she's already decided she didn't need it to determine your grade.

A:

I see other people are saying don't worry about it, and I completely agree. At the same time, I think it's worth acknowledging that your feelings are legitimate and that you have some valid reasons to feel discomfort about getting a grade you don't feel you've earned. Like many of us, you probably want to be judged and achieve success based on your real hard work and achievements and not due to some random error or act of charity. There is also an issue of fairness. For example, this grade might improve your GPA in a way that gives you a small but real advantage over another student who also didn't hand in their final project but was not so lucky to have such a compassionate (or absent-minded) professor. None of us who has any sense of fairness wants to benefit from this kind of injustice, so I completely understand why you find this troubling.
With that said, if this concerns only one grade in an undergrad class, the whole thing is really too trivial to spend any time worrying about, for the following reasons:

It is the professor's responsibility, not yours, to determine the grade you deserve. It's quite possible she saw your potential and sincerely believed you deserved a B+ even knowing that you hadn't completed the final essay.
Grades only contain statistical information anyway. It's quite possible and even likely that in other courses you got grades that were lower than you deserved (either in the sense that a concrete, measurable error or misjudgment of on the part of the professor occurred, or in a more abstract philosophical sense that the grade did not reflect your true knowledge of the material), or that in the course of your life you will suffer some other minor injustices. In the end those small injustices will more or less cancel each other out. In fact, suffering from depression is certainly its own much more major form of injustice.
You mentioned that later when you emailed the professor you actually sent her the essay you had completed. If in fact you did end up completing the assignment, then you got the educational benefit of the class and the assignment and demonstrated your knowledge, even if belatedly. So in the end you probably completely fulfilled the professor's expectations that caused her to give you the grade in the first place. So really, what do you have to feel guilty about, other than some technicality?
Lots and lots of students get grades that are higher than what they deserve, whether it's due to outright cheating, grade grubbing, or being intellectually lazy and just studying for the test without knowing or caring about the material. The injustice that you are describing (to the extent that it is one) seems to me like a pretty microscopic one that -- I'm sad to say -- drowns in an ocean of much worse injustice.

To summarize, I've often thought that guilt, while certainly a useful emotion, can at times be quite a counterproductive thing, and it is important not to obsess about it or let ourselves be paralyzed by it. The best thing you could do both for yourself and for the world is to focus on leading a good life and finding ways to help yourself and others, rather than worrying about a grade in some long-forgotten college class. I'm sure that is precisely what your professor would want you to be doing.

