Students voice concerns about possible effects of index

This is the second installment in a four-part series examining the Achievement Index proposal. Tomorrow's story will focus on faculty response to the proposal.

Myriad concerns pertaining to the Achievement Index have cropped up in recent weeks as students, professors and administrators continue to haggle over the proposal.

An initiative mired in controversy, the index seems to suffer from a lack of understanding among both students and faculty, as many of those contacted for this article declined to comment because they said they did not know enough about the proposition.

The Academic Affairs Committee of the Arts and Sciences Council is scheduled to vote today on the newly revised proposal, which the committee tabled last week pending the Duke Student Government referendum on the issue. In an election with an overall voter turnout of 50.5 percent, 88 percent of voters rejected the proposal. The full Arts and Sciences Council will vote on the proposal Thursday.

Trinity junior Dan Segal, DSG vice president for academic affairs, said students are "very scared" of the proposal and worry about increased competition, disproportionate weight given to larger classes and potential problems with graduate schools and employers. He said students also worry about specifics in the proposal concerning independent studies and small classes-issues the proposed amendments address.

Increased competitiveness is students' primary concern with the index.

Trinity senior Fred Aslan, a pre-med student, said he thinks the AI will make the grading system more fair, but at the expense of a healthy learning environment that fosters intellectualism.

"When I walk into a jazz class or something, my attitude is that I want to get a good grade and learn everything there is to learn in that class. When I walk into a pre-med class, my attitude is that I want to do better than everyone else," he said, adding that the cut-throat atmosphere in pre-med courses is unavoidable because of the bell curve. "You may not be conscious of it, but somewhere inside you it affects you," he said. "You know that if you help other students, you are spreading what you know, and others may end up coming out ahead of you."

This scenario is problematic, opponents have claimed, because it would place greater emphasis upon classes taken during a student's freshman and sophomore years, which is when students tend to take larger, introductory-level classes.

Opponents further contend that this scenario downplays the significance of a student's grades in his major-an unfortunate situation, they said, because employers traditionally have placed greater emphasis upon grades received in those courses.

"That's probably the scariest thing about that AI," Nesbit said, "all the unintended consequences."

But Val Johnson, associate professor of statistics and inventor of the AI, supports his brainchild, saying that one of the proposed amendments to the AI will obviate the aforementioned scenario.

"There's no weighting in class size," Johnson said, adding that students' junior and senior years, therefore, will affect their AI as much as the introductory-level classes taken during their first two years at the University. "The fact that [seminar] classes have fewer students won't necessarily mean that students will receive lower AIs."

The amendment to which Johnson referred mandates that the University send to a professor a report that evaluates his past grading record and pools his grades with those handed down by other faculty members in his department to determine a student's AI. This measure, Johnson said, would prevent additional weight from being given to larger classes because it would make instructors of smaller classes more aware of their grading patterns, thereby preventing them from giving out uniform grades.

Still, Nesbit said the language of the amendment is too vague and needs to be clarified before the Arts and Sciences Council votes on it.

"I don't see how the Arts and Sciences Council should even think about voting for this proposal until some specific policy governing independent studies is developed," Nesbit said, adding that he thinks the council should delay its vote by one month. "If you don't have the answers to your questions, you shouldn't vote."

Nesbit also took issue with the first amendment to the proposal, which allows for an 18-month trial period. During this period, each student will receive in the mail a copy of his AI-based class rank and AI-based GPA, neither of which will appear on his transcript.

The trial period, which is scheduled to begin May 1, "is doing nothing to address the problems we're facing now," Nesbit said. "I honestly don't know what's going to be any different in the next 18 months. We're going to have the same discussion again."

Johnson maintains, however, that the trial period will serve to educate both faculty members and students.

"We want to show the students what their adjusted GPAs and class ranks would be, and give them a better understanding as to how it's computed," Johnson said. "We want to provide students and faculty with information about how they're grading and how they're being graded."

Another concern is that the AI system will be unlike that used by any other school.

Trinity freshman Aaron Dorn said the AI could decrease the University's national competitiveness.

"Wouldn't GPAs be affected negatively assuming we're gunning for harder classes-that we're not making class decisions based on how difficult they are? And if everyone's GPA went down, then wouldn't the University's average go down?" Dorn asked, suggesting that such a decrease would make the University look bad to employers and others not acquainted with the system.

Akin to this concern is the fear that the interests of the AI and of the common way of calibrating grades will conflict. If students choose their courses regardless of teacher grading practices-as they should be able to do under the AI-they will be penalized when graduate schools and employers look at their GPAs.

Segal said the AI's incompatibility with other grading systems would nullify the proposal's intended solutions.

"The proponents of the proposal think it will stop grade shopping, but in actuality it won't affect the way students choose courses at all because grades still appear on the transcript," he said. "All law schools and most medical schools and graduate schools take the grades on your transcript and come up with their own GPAs, and that's what students will care about."

In a parallel debate to the one on the merits of the proposal, students are discussing the effectiveness of the way in which the campus-wide dialogue has been handled. Segal has organized two forums with Johnson, and DSG presidential candidates campaigned on the issue, most of them taking a stance against it.

Trinity junior Jeff Horwich, one of few vocal student supporters of the proposal, said he thinks DSG has done a "horrible" job of educating students about the AI.

"The reason why I got involved was that I was disappointed in the student debate," he said. "It was stifled much too quickly by the DSG vote.... It bothers me very much that DSG presumes it can honestly play the roles of responsible student informer and anti-AI lobbyist at the same time. It is ironic that they would encourage students to make up their own mind about the AI while simultaneously declaring that the student decision is a foregone conclusion."

Horwich noted that a poster for one of DSG's AI forums, which featured the headline "Say Goodbye to your GPA," was both incorrect and "a blatant misuse by DSG of its power to help students become informed."

Nesbit said, however, that DSG responded the way it did because valid students concerns have been unfairly dismissed by the administration.

"The entire debate has been very confrontational," Nesbit said. "We've raised issues only to have them dismissed as uninformed by the proponents of the proposal.... A lot of faculty members oppose it, and it is insulting to suggest that [students] simply don't understand the proposal. Instead, they may understand it all too well and that's why they oppose it."