The University of Maryland announced it was extending the course withdrawal deadline in response to thousands of students urging administrators to implement a pass/fail grading system, but students have continued to raise concerns regarding the decision.
Since the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. in March, students have faced homelessness, unemployment and personal loss on top of balancing online schoolwork in isolation.
“If life is not back to normal, grading shouldn’t be either,” a pass/fail advocacy petition signed by almost 8,000 people stated.
In an Instagram poll of 80 students from this university, 85% of respondents said they support pass/fail grading, listing reasons such as poor mental health and a lack of focus or motivation, which has led to a lower grade-point average. Sophomore economics and government and politics major Erika Bugaring said her current GPA does not accurately reflect her knowledge and abilities.
“My intention is to attend law school or some other type of graduate level education, and GPA is a huge factor,” Bugaring said. “Assessing my performance via remote learning is not reflective of how well I would perform as an in-person graduate or law school student.”
However, Associate Dean for general education Douglas Roberts said having actual grades, not a P or an F, is important for graduate school, higher level courses and this university’s limited enrollment programs.
This university implemented the optional pass/fail grading system last semester in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the sudden, mid-semester switch to online learning, Roberts said. Administrators then decided over the summer to return to the university’s regular grading policies for the fall semester.
A Student Government Association resolution also stated students don’t want to use course withdrawals because they don’t want to present a “W,” which indicates they withdrew, to job recruiters or graduate schools. This could put students at a disadvantage against other applicants with more experience.
SGA journalism representative Winter Hawk also said when a student withdraws from a class required for their major, it may not bring their GPA down, but they will have to retake the course, setting them back in their coursework.
“At least with pass or fail, [students] get credit for doing the work they did,” Hawk said. “But with withdrawal … it even puts a lot of students off track for graduation as well.”
To acknowledge the ongoing pandemic and the stress it has continued to place on students, Roberts said administrators urged faculty to be flexible with deadlines and the types of assessments they assigned. However, since students and faculty had more time to prepare for online learning this semester, the university believed that pass/fail grading wasn’t necessary.
“Having those grades is, in some ways, in the best interests of students’ future success,” Roberts said. “It might look, in the short term, that it takes a little bit of pressure off, but if it means that you end up having to repeat courses again in the future, that’s probably not the best solution.”
Sophomore computer science major Kunal Mehta also pointed out that pass/fail grading devalues students’ degrees because it allows students to move ahead in coursework who aren’t prepared for harder material, and it lessens the achievement of students who actually did well in the class.
“The University of Maryland is an accredited institution, and people trust that UMD graduates with solid transcripts are capable people,” Mehta said. “UMD doesn’t want to lose that value and name to their degrees.”
While students have raised concerns surrounding the implementation of pass/fail grading this semester, Kelley Bishop, the director of this university’s career center, said graduate schools and job recruiters may offer some leeway, considering the impact coronavirus has on students all over the U.S.
“Everybody’s been living through the pandemic. Everyone has been impacted by it. Everyone’s been affected by it,” Bishop said. “I don’t think there’s going to be any desire to apply what would’ve been the standard lens … to say, ‘Gee, your grades dropped or your grades are absent from 2020. What happened?’”
However, Bishop said job recruiters will look for students who learned something from their situation and adapted as best they could.
“I don’t imagine that the people that made it to the top did so because their grades were good,” Bishop said.