![[Currents header]](/homeart/currents_header.gif)
September 29, 1997
By Jim Burns
Beginning this quarter, new UCSC undergraduates can accumulate a grade-point average, while new and continuing students may request letter grades in almost every class. In addition, graduate students are also eligible to request letter grades for the first time.
The Academic Senate approved these changes last year on the recommendation of the Committee on Educational Policy and the Graduate Council, whose faculty members maintained that a revised grading policy would provide UCSC students with more options while retaining the campus's traditional Narrative Evaluation System.
Now that the changes are taking effect, however, the Registrar's Office is doing everything possible to ensure that students, faculty, lecturers, and others in the campus community aren't tripped up by the new grading policies. Toward that end, the office has scheduled four informational sessions in the next five weeks to discuss new policies and deadlines prompted by changes in UCSC's grading system.
The sessions are scheduled at the following times and locations:
Until this year, students could elect to supplement narrative evaluations with letter grades in some lower-division and most upper-division courses. Even in courses in which grades were offered, students received either an "A," "B," "C," or "No Pass." This fall, however, everyone responsible for a section (with the exception of college core courses, student-directed seminars, physical education classes, and a handful of other courses) must know the nuances of evaluating with grades, including "D"s and "F"s.
"There may be an increase in requests for grades, especially from new students who want to acquire a GPA," predicts Nancy Pascal, associate registrar. "The new GPA, the increased number of courses in which grades are offered, and many new deadlines and procedure changes may be confusing in this first quarter."
The GPA procedures alone may be confusing at first, Pascal says. Cumulative GPAs, for example, may come and go on the end-of-quarter records the Registrar's Office provides students and sends off campus to graduate schools or other parties. "The GPA will appear only if the student has requested letters grades in at least two-thirds of the credits attempted at UCSC, so meeting or not meeting that threshold could change from quarter to quarter," she says.
Registrar's Office staff also view it as imperative that students requesting an "incomplete" understand the different way that option is treated if a letter grade was or was not requested. "If a student receives an 'incomplete' in a course in which he or she elected a letter grade--and the student fails to complete the work or file a petition on time--the incomplete will be changed to an 'F,' which will be part of the student's permanent record," Pascal says.
"That's just one important example of a policy change," says Pascal, who strongly encourages members of the campus community who have any uncertainty about the changes in grading procedures to attend one of the information sessions. "The four meetings probably won't eliminate all confusion this quarter, but they could greatly reduce it."
Information about the new policies can also be found on the Registrar's Office home page (http://www.ucsc.edu/registrar).