ASUW is looking into the issue of revising the plus-minus grading system now that a WyoVocal petition to do away with it has reached 1,091 votes.
Implementation of the new grading scale at UW began last semester.
“Grades should let the students know how much they’ve learned, how effective their learning it,” Edward Janak, associate professor of educational studies, said. “The very, very broad strokes that letter-grading gives doesn’t really do that for you.”
Involved with the policy from the very beginning, Janak is on the faculty senate that first discussed it, the student interaction committee that reviewed and researched it, on senate again when it was debated and is now the faculty senate chair as the new grading scale is being implemented.
ASUW charged the issue to its Academics, Technology and Sustainability Committee, chaired by Josh Materi, for further review.
“I get where faculty senate is coming from when they push for this to pass,” Materi said. “It will make students work harder.”
Even so he said he sympathizes with the students who say the scale is applied unevenly across classes and majors because instructors have the choice to not use the new system.
“If you get in the wrong section of a class—one that has plus/minus while the others have the old scale—it’s just not fair,” Materi said. “Personally, as a graduating senior, if I were to go back and do it all over again, I would absolutely hate this.”
Janak said during the faculty senate debates, many instructors were concerned about having control over their own grading. This resulted in the policy not being made mandatory across campus.
UW’s new plus/minus grading system has sparked controversy among faculty, staff and students.
“When we were debating it, a lot of teachers looked at it as an issue of academic freedom,” he said. “They said if they didn’t want to grade plus or minus, they shouldn’t have to. But I agree with students. I think it should be a uniform grading system campus-wide.”
Harold Kanter, a psychology major minoring in statistics, said he supported the petition mostly because of the inequality created by a policy that is not enforced campus-wide.
“I have an unfair advantage over others taking classes in a department that does not use the system,” he said. “With how the current system is set up, I think the old system is better.”
Amy Cox is another supporter of the petition who hopes to see a change made or the old system reinstituted.
“With the old system, there is a greater drive to get a 90 percent and an A than an 87 percent and a B+,” Cox said. “If the university really wanted to raise GPA, the should allow a plus system, without the minus, to reward students who work harder than the rest.”
While the goal of the new grading scale is not to raise GPAs, Janak said it is a fairer way to give students the grades they deserve and a better way to show students how well they are doing.
“From an instructor’s point of view, it gives me a lot more precision in my grading,” he said. “[Under the old system,] a student who gets an 89.4 gets the same level of B that a student who gets a 79.6.”
