Last Thursday, the Faculty Senate was presented with a motion by Christoph Steinbruchel, an associate professor in the Material Science and Engineering Department, to address the inconsistency between the undergraduate and graduate grading to courses. It specifically addressed the differences in the two policies regarding retaking courses. Steinbruchel’s motion was to match the graduate policy with that of the undergraduate policy so that all students had the opportunity retake a class and replace the old grade with the new one.
In the current undergraduate policy, students are given the opportunity to retake a class and use the new grade acquired from that class to replace the old grade. In the existing graduate policy, however, students are forced to take the average of the new class grade and that of the old.
According to Steinbruchel, the inconsistency between the two grading policies originated some 20 years ago, but the original reasons for the two different policies have since been forgotten. Steinbruchel explained that a certain number of graduate students came to him asking, “Why is this policy different from the undergraduate one?”, and stating that “there is no reason why the two policies should be different.” He took the discrepancy brought up by the graduate students into last Thursday’s Senate Meeting and persuaded the Senate to unanimously vote for his motion to change the policy.
The motion must now be presented to the faculty as a whole and be accepted before it can be presented to the provost and finally to President Shirley Ann Jackson for approval of the change in the graduate policy. Steinbruchel added that the change in the policy could come into effect “possibly next fall,” but not right away because a “general rule is not to change the grading policy in the middle of the semester.”
If it does go into effect next fall, the policy would apply to all graduate students, not just new ones.
When asked why the differences in the policy were a problem, Steinbruchel explained that the graduate grading policy creates unfair hardships for graduate students. The policy as it stands now depreciates the GPA of students retaking classes, and graduate students must retain a 3.00 GPA to maintain financial aid. The current policy puts a lot of pressure on the graduate students to retain the 3.00 GPA. Interestingly, Steinbruchel explained that students going for their Master’s degrees would benefit from the change because those students can take up to 36 credits for their Master’s but only 30 get counted toward the GPA, meaning a student could use the 6 credits acquired from retaking a class instead of the 6 from the original class, therefore boosting the GPA of the student. The grades from all classes, however, would still be on transcripts.
