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The Daily Princetonian

Proposal for change to P/D/F policy unanimously voted down

?The USG Academics Committee?s proposal to create a policy allowing students to rescind a pass/D/fail election after viewing a final letter grade was unanimously voted down by the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing earlier this month. The unanimous decision came after Academics Committee chair Dillon Sharp ?14 and Class of 2014 senator and Academic Life Total Assessment committee member John McNamara presented to the committee on April 17. ?It?s dead; it?s not happening,? Sharp said. Had the Committee on Examination and Standing voted in favor of the proposal, the Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy would have also had to vote in its favor before the entire faculty would have the opportunity to approve it. The policy was one of the Academics Committee?s main priorities for the semester. Sharp explained at the beginning of his tenure as chair that 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. Claire Fowler, senior associate dean of the college and an ex officio member of the Committee on Examinations and Standing, noted that there was consensus in the committee?s discussion to preserve the point of the University?s P/D/F option, which the committee believed was to encourage students not to worry about grades in a class. ?The faculty really thought the point of the P/D/F policy was to permit students to take courses that they were interested in without regard to grades, and they felt that the new proposal was putting the grade anxiety back into the P/D/F category,? Fowler said.

NEWS | 04/29/2013

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The Daily Princetonian

Faculty thanks Tilghman at her last meeting as U. president

University faculty approved a new undergraduate certificate program in Statistics and Machine Learning at a faculty meeting on Monday.The certificate program was organized over two years by computer science professor Robert Schapire, associate computer science professor David Blei, molecular biology professor John Storey, associate politics professor Kosuke Imai and Operations Research and Financial Engineering professor Jianqing Fan, according to Schapire. He said that the impetus for the certificate program came from the increasing importance of data to companies, governments and organizations as well as from greater student interest in the fields of machine learning and statistics. ?Princeton has a lot of strength in machine learning and statistics, but it?s kind of spread out all over campus, and so this is going to be a way of bringing faculty and researchers and students in one place,? Schapire said,

NEWS | 04/28/2013