The faculty voted to institute the new grading system in the fall of 1998, which means that the grades of all freshmen, sophomores and incoming students will be affected. The pros and cons of the new system are debatable; however, the way the change was made was handled badly.
The Student Government survey soliciting student opinion about the plus/minus system showed that students opposed it 60 percent to 40 percent. An open forum was therefore planned to discuss the plan before the vote took place; however, because of a fatal car accident involving a faculty member's family, the open forum had to be rescheduled -- but it was rescheduled the week after the vote on the decision.
The rescheduling of the forum was unavoidable and the fault of no one; however, even after junior Will Ashworth, SG Speaker of the House, attended Tuesday's faculty meeting to ask faculty members to table the vote until the issue could be discussed with students more fully, especially in light of the SG survey results, the faculty decided to vote anyway, disregarding the wishes of the students whose lives they were affecting and making a mockery of next week's open forum.
Not only has the faculty decided to ignore student interest, but they are ignoring their own rules as well. Their policy is that any changes made in the curriculum or in academic procedure only affect the classes that enter the university after the changes have been made. This change, which will affect current students as well as incoming ones, is in effect breaking the contract the undergraduate college has made with its current students. The current freshmen and sophomores did not enroll in a university that had an established plus/minus grading system. They should not be forced to adapt to a school with policies they didn't bargain for.
A responsible faculty interested in the desires and opinions of the students for which, in theory, their jobs exist, would have postponed a decision until the controversial matter could be fully discussed. And then, if the plan was voted in, it should have been implemented after all current students had left the unversity and all those who enrolled knew about the plan.