UA announces move to allow ‘pass/no credit’ option

FAYETTEVILLE — The University of Arkansas will allow undergraduate students to choose a pass/no credit grading option after receiving letter grades for their spring semester courses, the university announced Thursday.

“Students will be assigned a letter grade with the flexibility to request to have their grade changed to a pass, pass with a D, or no credit (NC). Graduate students may apply through their degree programs for a similar system, and law students will move to a pass/fail policy,” Chancellor Joe Steinmetz said in an email to campus.

UA joins some other large public universities in making similar changes to expand pass/fail grading as colleges have moved to remote instruction in response to the covid-19 outbreak.

Steinmetz said the grading policy decision was made with “input from the Faculty Senate Executive Committee (and lots of student feedback).”

By Thursday evening, an online petition seeking to have UA change to pass/fail grading for spring courses had more than 9,000 signatures.

“Some people thrive in courses online and others greatly struggle without the in class resources we had before,” states the petition, started by Presley Hope.

Barrett Weidman, 20, a sophomore chemical engineering major, was among those to sign the petition.

“We’re not really getting the educational experience that we paid for,” Weidman said.

Students and faculty both must adjust to the online-only courses, she said.

“With a change this big, a lot of people feel uncomfortable,” Weidman said, adding some students now are in homes crammed with younger, noisy siblings.

She described big differences between faculty in how they’re teaching her courses.

In one course, a professor has “done a good job adjusting to Zoom for us to have live lectures,” Weidman said, referring to the video conferencing online application.

She said in another technical course, a professor isn’t giving video lectures but instead sending students lecture notes.

“I don’t think he maybe has the technology in his home, or maybe he doesn’t know how,” Weidman said, though she added he’s made himself available online for questions from students.

In the class, “we’re just being taught less and expected to learn more ourselves,” Weidman said.

James “JD” DiLoreto-Hill, president of UA’s Graduate-Professional Student Body, said earlier in the week “there is some anxiety over the unknown” for graduate students.

“Because of licensure issues (nursing, counseling, social work, etc.) some programs simply cannot allow passing grads for anything less than an 80. So it will be completely decided by individual program directors which is leaving many unsure about what that will mean individually,” DiLoreto-Hill said.