Faculty voted to amend the course catalog to allow students to undo Pass/Fail designations for previous courses until their penultimate semester at the College. Fifty-six voted in favor of the change, eight voted against, and one abstained at a faculty meeting on Feb. 14.
The new policy, brought to the faculty by the Committee on Educational Affairs (CEA), also states that reversing a Pass/Fail designation would not allow a student to designate an additional course Pass/Fail in the future. Students may still only designate a maximum of three courses as Pass/Fail during their time at the College.
Previously, the course catalog allowed students to designate a course as Pass/Fail up until one week after grades were due for the semester, and these designations were generally irreversible. Courses taken Pass/Fail are not factored into GPA calculations and cannot be used to fulfill divisional or major requirements, unless the course is a student’s first course in the major (in which case it can count for major, but not other requirements).
Before the change, students could petition department chairs to make exceptions to the rule and allow multiple Pass/Fail courses taken Pass/Fail to count towards a major. Such requests are “not a huge number … but there are some, and it is a bit burdensome,” Chair and Professor of Economics Jon Bakija said at the faculty meeting.
“Every time a chair is asked to make an exception like this, either there is going to be an outcome that is unnecessarily harsh to a student … or an outcome that is going to be unfair,” Bakija continued. “It’s very hard to turn down such a request.”
CEA Chair and Professor of Art Guy Hedreen explained at the meeting that students may want to reverse a Pass/Fail designation for a number of reasons: to fulfill major or divisional requirements, to fulfill medical school requirements, or to count their grade in a previously Pass/Fail course towards their GPA.
Such situations prompted the CEA to propose the new provision within the rules governing Pass/Fail. According to the CEA’s memo to the faculty, which Hedreen read at the meeting, the amendment to the policy was initially inspired by petitions for exceptions to the current Pass/Fail policy. However, it evolved to allow students to reverse a Pass/Fail designation for any reason, not just to fulfill major requirements.
At the meeting, Hedreen explained that allowing reversals of Pass/Fail designations any later than the deadline would cause difficulty for the Registrar’s Office when calculating final GPAs for graduating seniors.
In addition, Hedreen said, the change will lighten departments’ administrative burden. “[Now] we don’t have to hear the petitions,” he said.
At the meeting, Hedreen noted that students generally utilize the Pass/Fail option far less than they are allowed. Students take an average of 0.76 courses Pass/Fail during their time at the College (excluding the spring of 2020), and that number drops to 0.64 when all semesters with special pandemic-era Pass/Fail rules are excluded.
Hedreen described the amendment as a “tweak to the policy,” but said that he and the CEA hope it provides a common-sense solution to a rare but significant issue that some students may encounter.
