ASUW will take another look at the possibility of switching to a plus/minus grading system Tuesday night before the Board of Trustees votes on the issue at its meeting this month.
The current grading system that UW operates on now is A through F, with an A equaling 4.00, a B equaling a 3.00 and so forth. If UW switches to a plus/minus grading scale, an A would be a 4.00 and an A minus would be a 3.67. There would be even more variation as grades went down, as a B plus would be a 3.33, a B would be 3.00, and a B minus would be a 2.67.
“It wouldn’t really affect grades so much as GPAs. If a student has a low A and receives an A minus, it brings the grade down. But if you have a B and receive a B plus then it brings the grade up,” ASUW Vice President Brett Kahler said.
Some students may not feel the effects of a new grading system, and some students may even benefit from it, but it could still negatively affect many.
“It would help some students, but it would also hurt some students, and we don’t want to hurt any students,” ASUW President Joel Defebaugh said.
While older students may assume the switch to this grading scale would not affect them, there is no grandfather system, according to Defebaugh. If the plus/minus system were to be implemented in the fall of 2013, even seniors and juniors would be affected.
Last Friday, ASUW surveyed students to see how they felt about the possibility of switching to this grading scale and found that newer students would actually be more in favor of switching.
“It was mostly freshmen who liked the plus/minus grading system because it’s what they were used to in high school. But I don’t think that they realize how difficult it is would be for seniors to change their GPAs,” Defebaugh said.
Schools that use a plus/minus grading system found that switching mostly affected students who had higher GPAs.
“In our research, we found that students who performed higher in their classes actually took the biggest hit with the new grading scale,” College of Arts and Sciences Senator Jaryd Unangst, said.
Over the summer, members of ASUW did their own research on the plus/minus grading scale. They found that a good portion of schools in the Rocky Mountain region used the system, but Defebaugh said he believes UW already stands out and sees no reason to change.
In their research, ASUW also found that some students lost their scholarships when their GPA’s went down after switching to the plus/minus system.
Students who had been neutral toward the new grading scale only became unhappy with it when they saw how their grades were affected, according to Kahler.
Defebaugh says that even if a school does find that the plus/minus grading scale does not work, it is not easily reversible.
“It’s not something that you can just say ‘oops we messed up’,” Defebaugh said.
Faculty Senate is looking into the switch because they believe it would allow for more accurate grading.
“The faculty doesn’t want to use this system to hurt students, they just want more precision and accuracy in grading,” Khaler said.
“But we looked at several universities who do use the plus/minus grading system and when students apply to their graduate programs it doesn’t really matter if you come from a plus/minus grading system or not. It’s the same as schools who accept both ACT and SAT scores.”
Unangst says that it is easy to understand why the faculty would want this type of grading scale, but that students who are highly involved may also be hit by it.
“I can understand why the faculty would think this system would be a more fair way to grade students, because it may seem like students with low B’s are just sliding by. But my biggest concern are students who are in the A range,” Unangst said.
Defebaugh says that even by not switching to the plus/minus grading system that the Faculty Senate would prefer, the faculty still have the power when it comes to grading and can still put the grading scale at whatever they want.
For example, for an A the grading scale can be between a 93 and 100 percent, and a B can be between an 85 and 92 percent and so forth.
“We don’t want to take the power away from the faculty. They still have the power to set the grading scale to be whatever they want for their classes, we just believe that you should leave the university with the same grading scale that they came in with,” Defebaugh said.
