Tomorrow, the Arts and Sciences Council has the opportunity to alter Trinity College’s pass/fail policy and thereby encourage intellectual exploration among students.
Under the current policy, students must decide to take a course P/F by the end of drop/add, and courses taken P/F do not count toward major requirements or T-Reqs. In addition, the P/F option is not available to first-year students and cannot be used for seminars and tutorials.
A pass/fail policy at a liberal arts institution should be flexible enough to allow students to concentrate on intellectual exploration, not grades and GPAs. The current policy fails at this goal, and changes made at tomorrow’s meeting could remedy the situation.
The proposed pass/fail policy would rename a passing grade as “satisfactory,” raise the bar for a satisfactory grade to a C - or higher and allow individual instructors to determine if students may take their course—seminars included—on a pass/fail basis.
There is general support within the Council for these changes, and reasonably so. The new satisfactory/unsatisfactory designation brings the system in line with the procedure for granting credit to study abroad classes, and it increases the number and types of classes that can be taken pass/fail.
The policy also contains several contentious proposals. In past meetings, the Council has disagreed about three important points: permitting pre-major students to take courses on a P/F basis, allowing individual departments to count a pass/fail course toward their major’s requirements and determining the procedure and timing for students to opt into a class pass/fail. We will discuss each of these in turn.
First, the Council should amend the policy to include pre-major students. Permitting freshmen to enroll in a course on a pass/fail basis will encourage risk-taking that often leads to the discovery of intellectual interests. For practical reasons, this is better sooner rather than later on in a student’s academic career.
Furthermore, students arrive at Duke with varying levels of preparation, and allowing first-years to take a course P/F enables them to adjust academically without permanently damaging their GPA.
Second, individual departments should be able to determine if a course taken on a pass/fail basis will count toward its major’s prerequisites or requirements. Major requirements vary greatly from department to department, and some required classes carry more relevance to a student’s course of study than others.
To this end, deciding guidelines for pass/fail within a particular department should be left to the faculty—the very people who are most familiar with their major and have a vested interest in maintaining its intellectual rigor.
Third, the Council should give students up until the end of the course correction period to “tag” a class that they wish to take pass/fail. Then, by the course withdrawal deadline four weeks from the end of the semester, the student would make a final decision to take the course P/F or receive a letter grade.
Such a policy would encourage students to explore their intellectual interests while also incentivizing engagement with course material, since the student can still opt for a letter grade up until relatively late in the semester.
Most students want the opportunity to enroll in a breadth of challenging and interesting classes, but the fear of a bad grade damaging post-graduation prospects often precludes them from doing so.
The A&S Council should recognize this unfortunate reality and bring meaningful change to the pass/fail policy.
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