By Vanessa Broadbent (The Cascade) – Email
Policy revisions are in the works that would bring UFV’s grading standards into line across departments, and with other institutions in BC. Currently, no university-wide standard for percentages exists.
The Undergraduate Education Committee (UEC) of Senate is working on the policy, which is slated to be brought to a Senate meeting this semester for potential approval.
Christine Slavik, a Faculty of Professional Studies representative on Senate, explains that the proposed policy would affect both students planning to complete all their studies at UFV, and students with plans to move on to other universities.
“In order for students to successfully get into graduate studies in other universities, [the committee] were proposing that we have a similar scheme to other universities, so that an A and an A+ at UFV is the same grading scale as the university that someone is trying to go into,” she says.
Vice-provost and associate vice-president academic Peter Geller says that the policy would address a gap at UFV.
“The current policy doesn’t quite set that out and the new policy will establish a common grading scheme,” he says. “Compared to the current system, which basically gives a grade and grade point and no percentage, the key difference [is] we’re now specifying letter grades with a percentage equivalent.”
Student Union Society (SUS) president Thomas Davies says that part of the idea for the change came about last year when he, along with SUS executives Ryan Petersen and Dylan Thiessen, realized that there was no standardized grading system at UFV.
“You can get the same percentage, and get three different letter grades for whatever you may be working on,” he says. “We all agreed that there needed to be consistency for evaluating for scholarships and bursaries, for grad school, for work, for transferring to another school. If there’s no consistency, it’s impossible to assess someone’s performance in a valid manner.”
SUS decided to bring the matter to Senate’s attention. After drafting a policy amendment for the current grading system last summer, Senate asked SUS for their feedback.
Part of the UEC’s process included looking at what grading policies other universities used.
“Looking at 44 institutions, 30 gave a percentage to letter grades,” Geller explains. “There’s never only one way to do things, but we were looking for a way that worked.”
But as with any broadly applied policy, changes could have ripple effects that some argue would not be entirely beneficial. In this case, adjusting the correlation between letter grades and percentages might mean that, while there would be consistency for all of UFV, the same would not be true between students within a department from one year to the next. In some departments, this could lead to a depreciation of grades, as the threshold for some letter grades rises.
“I’m not sure [grades] need to be absolutely the same across everything. I think that’s the point of this conversation, that faculties are saying, “What is the benefit to that? Why do we need to have it similar across programs?”
For Geller, the change will bring transparency and be less confusing for students.
“We were hearing feedback from lots of students that when you don’t have a common grading scheme, there can be variations in grading,” he says. “It might not be clear what that letter grade and that grade point represents, so it’s just a matter of being more transparent about that and having a shared understanding across the institution.”
The policy has already been held back once by the UEC for revisions and clarifications, and will likely inspire debate at Senate once it is submitted as a motion. Though Davies says he hopes the policy will be changed according to SUS’s input by the Fall 2016 semester, the policy is still far from a guaranteed approval.
“I’m not sure the whole thing has been fleshed out enough to make sound arguments one way or another at this point,” Slavik says. “Whatever we do, we want it to be fair to students.”
