The USG’s academics committee has a busy year ahead of it, with major policy changes planned for the pass/D/fail option and the academic calendar, while other initiatives are under consideration.
“One thing I’m really, really excited about is the academics policy changes,” Shawon Jackson ’15 said when discussing his term as USG president. “I’m hoping all of that goes through the vote in the faculty committee.”
The academics committee consists of students and faculty and is chaired by Dillon Sharp ’14. It is divided into four subcommittees, which oversee course of study, undergraduate admissions and financial aid, implementation of the Academic Life Total Assessment survey’s findings and the academic supplementary committee.
Sharp, who served as Class of 2014 senator for two years before running unopposed for his current position, said one of the academics committee’s priorities this semester will be to reform the current P/D/F policy. He said the committee hopes to give students the opportunity to rescind a P/D/F after viewing a final grade, although a rescinded P/D/F would still count as one of the student’s four allowed P/D/F selections.
“Ultimately, you put the work into that class, and you’ve earned that grade,” Sharp said.
He explained the policy change would encourage students to continue to work hard throughout the semester and give them the chance to improve their grade point averages if they ended up doing better in a class than previously expected.
According to Sharp, University faculty will vote on the proposed changes in April, which, if approved, could be put into effect next fall. Sharp said he is “optimistic” that the reform will be passed.
Dean of the College Valerie Smith, whose office oversees the undergraduate curriculum and academic advising, did not respond to requests for comment about the USG’s proposed policy changes.
But not everyone supports the new policy.
“P/D/F was created so that students of great intellectual ambition could exercise that intellectual ambition without dire consequences,” professor of visual arts P. Adams Sitney said. “Almost immediately, it became a universal get-out-of-work-free card and plays into the worst aspect of this and every university.”
Sitney said he did not like the proposed changes to the policy either, likening the reforms to insider trading since students would buy the “stock” knowing that no negative result could come of it.
However, Sharp sees the policy change as “a win-win-win” for the students, faculty and administration.
“With this new policy, you’d have more encouragement for students who had P/D/F-ed it to keep on working hard in class, be productive and contribute more so than they would otherwise,” he said.
The academics committee is also seeking to make changes to the academic calendar in order to extend Thanksgiving break to include the Wednesday before the holiday. The calendar would compensate for the lost day by beginning the fall semester on a Wednesday rather than on a Thursday.
According to Sharp, both students and faculty are in favor of taking the Wednesday off because the extra day would give everyone more time to travel and spend with family.
He also said that adding a Wednesday class to freshman week at the beginning of the fall semester would benefit students who, because of their enrollment in a class that is taught on Mondays and Wednesdays, would be unable to attend class until the second week.
Sharp said there is a “slight chance” that the calendar change could go into effect next year if passed by the faculty and administration, but given that next year’s academic calendar has already been arranged, the possibility remains remote. Changing the academic calendar in the way Sharp suggests would require changing the orientation schedule, which in turn would affect the scheduling of Outdoor Action, Community Action and the Freshman Scholars Institute.
Sharp also said he hopes to improve aspects of shopping period by giving students better access to course reviews and reviews of particular professors in the course of his term. In this vein, he added that he wants to encourage professors to distribute course evaluations after midterm exams in order to have the opportunity to make any accommodating changes if necessary.
The academics committee has also considered a number of other policy changes, including making it easier for students to reschedule exams within 24 hours of each other, creating a centralized way for students to find and join study groups, decreasing the overlap of certain classes at certain times, examining why students must apply to some classes long before course registration and evaluating why certain classes are held during reading period.
Many of these changes include encouraging professors to make adjustments to their syllabi; in addition to midterm course evaluations, the committee hopes to encourage professors to assign smaller assignments more frequently during the semester to take some weight off of midterm and final exams and to assign less reading and not cover new material during midterm week.
“Midterms week is often more stressful than the final exam week, and it doesn’t have to be,” he said.
Sharp said that he seeks to keep professors’ opinions in mind when crafting policy because such policy is more likely to gain their favor and subsequent passage.
“My job is to represent the student interest and what the students want, but in doing so I have to work with the faculty and the administration,” he said. “A lot of the projects that are most successful are those that benefit both students and faculty.”
Many of the initiatives that the committee is working on this year were created in response to the data collected by the ALTA survey, which the committee distributed last May. According to Sharp, 49 percent of the undergraduate student body responded to the survey, which helps when it comes to discussing policies with the administration.
“To get 49 percent of the population is just amazing,” Sharp said. “It gives us a lot of validity in what we’re saying [to the administration].”
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