According to the Undergraduate Announcement, the intent of the P/D/F option is to “encourage exploration and experimentation in curricular areas in which the student may have had little or no previous experience.” While the new policy certainly serves to encourage students to venture beyond their academic spheres of comfort without having to worry about their grade point averages, it does not adequately reward students who late in the semester find themselves doing unexpectedly well in a course that they are taking P/D/F. These students have little incentive to continue to put time and energy into the class during the remainder of the semester. By resigning themselves to a pass grade even after spending a majority of the semester reaping the intellectual rewards of hard work, students are discouraged from further learning and from performing at their full potential. To remedy this problem, students should be allowed rescind the P/D/F option through the final week of classes.
While some may argue that three weeks of classes — the length of time that would be affected by this proposed change — does not represent a significant portion of the semester, students who are able to utilize the last quarter of the semester to achieve a good grade in a course they previously elected to take P/D/F should be allowed to receive that grade. The current deadline also fails to recognize that for some courses, graded work from the sixth and seventh weeks of the semester may not be returned until after the ninth week of classes. Others might argue that the P/D/F option should be rescindable until the beginning of the following semester — that is, after students have received their final grades. This would, however, distort the goals of the P/D/F policy by allowing students to use it not to expand their academic horizons, but to simply manipulate their GPA.
In promoting the goals of a broad liberal arts education, the University should encourage students not only to take interesting and challenging classes in which they do not expect to excel, but also to excel in these classes even after they have chosen to hedge their bets with a P/D/F grading option. Allowing students to rescind the P/D/F option through the final weeks of class would do much to achieve this goal.
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