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. “There was a general sense that the current policy, which permits students to elect P/D/F at the end of week nine, served them very well in that they were able to figure out how well they were doing in the class before electing to P/D/F it.”

The Academics Committee decided to pursue a policy allowing students to rescind a P/D/F after reviewing the results of the 2012 ALTA survey, which indicated that 89 percent of students were in favor of such a policy.

“When 89 percent of your constituents want something to happen, it’s a pretty good indication that you should do it,” Sharp said.

He said he spoke to many professors and administrators who were supportive of the idea, so he was “optimistic” that the reform would pass.

The vote was more surprising for the Academics Committee given the fact that all but one member of the faculty Committee on the Course of Study had voted in favor of the proposal at the end of February, Sharp said.

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“Everybody who worked on ALTA, everybody in student government was surprised,” he explained. “We thought from the beginning that we had a solid proposal. We didn’t change our strategy for the Committee on Examination and Standing.”

Astrophysical sciences professor Michael Strauss, who is on the Committee on the Course of Study, said the committee thoroughly discussed the proposal and couldn’t come up with any drawbacks.

“The whole point of the P/D/F as we were discussing is to encourage students to go outside their comfort zones,” Strauss said. “And it happens at times that students do better in those courses than they thought … so this would be an opportunity to give them some flexibility to make the best of both worlds.”

Max Weiss, a history and Near Eastern Studies professor on the Committee on the Course of Study and the lone dissenting vote on the committee, said he saw a few disadvantages with the proposal.

“It seemed to me to be an idea that had not been adequately thought through, so in a way I was both surprised and pleased to discover that the proposal had been voted down in the other committee,” Weiss said.

Weiss likened the “ethical conundrum” of allowing students to rescind the P/D/F option after viewing a final grade to insider trading, since students could be assured that they would either get an A or a P on their transcript.

“I think [the P/D/F policy at Princeton] has done what it was supposed to do: mainly, to stimulate students to think more widely, broadly, creatively about what it is they want to get out of their undergraduate education,” Weiss said. “What I found problematic about this proposal was that despite the pretenses to the contrary by the promoters of the proposal, it did not seem to me that this was the spirit within which it was being forwarded. I got the impression that the concern was more about legitimate anxieties about grade point averages.”

Fowler added that another point of contention in the nature of the proposal was that all P grades are currently seen as neutral, but a P grade would be known as a C if the policy were to change.

“We believed that the benefits that would have been gained from this proposal, had it passed, would have far outweighed the consequences that might result of people reading Ps as Cs,” Sharp said.

Despite the attempts of the Academics Committee, the Committee on Examinations and Standing was not convinced.

“Our job is to figure out what the real pros and cons are,” Fowler said. “What emerged in the discussion was more negatives than positives.”

Since the proposal did not pass, the Academics Committee will now work to prepare for another meeting with the Committee on Examinations and Standing next fall in which the two committees will discuss improvements to the final examination period.