D construction

P/D/F is a good idea. In theory it offers a way to take a course that might be interesting but challenging, without jeopardizing one’s grade point average if the course turns out to be too tough. The truth, however, at least as far as I can tell from a dozen years of teaching and advising, is that in practice P/D/F is used primarily to lighten the workload — by choosing to PDF, you can get by with significantly less work than if you’re striving for a good grade.

I’m strongly in favor of low-risk academic exploration, and pretty sympathetic to workload management, though as I remind students in my course every fall, P/D/F has three possible outcomes, only one of which is good, and it’s unwise to probe the boundary between P and D too closely.

Having three outcomes is a lot better than plain pass/fail. From the instructor’s side, coming up with fair grades is hard enough and an F is a serious sanction that one is reluctant to use without very clear grounds. D is often a suitable middle ground: it sends a strong message, and it sticks to the student’s academic record, but it’s not fatal.

How many people P/D/F a given course? Those numbers are certainly known in registrar-land, but they seem to be a closely held secret. By virtue of being on the right university committee, I once saw the statistics for my own course for a five or six year period. I don’t now recall the exact details, but if memory serves, P/D/F-ers varied from about 25 percent to as high as 75 percent, a surprisingly large range. Would it change the way that faculty teach if we were to learn ex post facto how many students had P/D/F’ed a course? It seems unlikely, but my attempts to get this aggregate information have thus far been to no avail. Everything is anecdotal, and one learns only from individual students who volunteer the information. Of course I can make a guess from the apparent effort that a student is putting in, but that’s not very reliable; some of the hardest-working people in my class are worried about passing, not about whether they’ll get an A.

The P/D/F election deadline used to be much earlier in the semester, before midterm week and thus before most students had received any real feedback about their likely success in a class. That probably wasn’t fair, and every so often a proposal is floated to move the P/D/F deadline even later. In the limit, say some, why not let students make their choice after their final grades are received? This isn’t likely to fly with the faculty, however, since it amounts to a game in which the dealer plays with all cards face up, and the end result would be a weird sort of Gresham’s Law in which the only grades were A and P.

Perhaps the deadline could be after the final exam but before the grade is revealed? That’s only marginally better, and at least seems just as unlikely to happen. The current deadline is a decent compromise.

I recently had a visit from a student in this year’s class. She had been planning to take advantage of the P/D/F option, but was pleasantly surprised by a better than expected midterm grade. Now she was wondering whether to take it for a letter grade after all. There was a real chance of doing well, but she worried that a poor grade would hurt her GPA and thus diminish her future prospects. It’s never going to be an easy decision in such a situation, but since COS 109: Computers in Our World is a QR course, let’s do some quantitative reasoning. Suppose that she’s a strong A student and will sustain a 3.95 GPA to the end. If she does horribly for the rest of the semester (most unlikely, given her obvious effort) and only manages a B–, her new GPA will be 3.91. She would take a hit but it won’t make the difference between grad school at Stanford and flipping burgers at McDonald’s. It’s still a tough decision, but not nearly as fraught as she might have feared.

So today is the big day. For most people, it’s a non-event: the large majority of students never use all of the four P/D/Fs they are entitled to. For those of you still on the fence, my advice is simple: Do whatever you like. You might get luckier than you thought and pull off a decent grade, especially if you do work a little harder. Or it might be better to focus your time on other courses or on having a life; there’s no shame in that. Just don’t slack off too much. Remember, I also have to make a decision: to D or not to D.