Administrators at the Graduate School have no plans to make changes to its current grading system, Dean of the Grad School Sheila Bonde told The Herald Monday.
Earlier this semester, officials at the Grad School had discussed changing its grading policy in light of a proposal drafted by Dean of the College Paul Armstrong to add pluses and minuses to the University's grading system.
The College Curriculum Council voted against Armstrong's proposal March 14, and Bonde told The Herald Monday that "we have no plans to go ahead independently."
"Since the CCC has not brought this forward, (a new grading policy) probably will not be raised until there is a new dean of the college," she said. At this point, there is "no real pressure to change."
Bonde told The Herald in March that, following the outcome of Armstrong's plus/minus proposal, the Grad School "may decide to go to a unified system, and we might decide to use a separate system" from the undergraduate College.
At a University-wide forum in March addressing the proposal, Bonde described "a high level of support" for the proposal at the Grad School, according to a March 10 Herald article covering the event.
The GSC had voted to send a proposal to add pluses and minuses to the Grad School's grading system to the Faculty Executive Committee before the CCC decision. Since the CCC did not recommend a new grading policy for the College, no changes were adopted.
The Grad School currently has no formal policy dictating how professors should grade students. Instead it has adopted the same policy as the undergraduate College, Bonde said. The Grad School gives out A's, B's and C's and also provides a Satisfactory/No Credit grading option.
In addition, some departments have a policy requiring professors to give students written evaluations along with grades at the end of every semester. According to Chung Nguyen GS, vice president of administration for the GSC, the Department of American Civilization uses such a requirement and also solicits evaluations from professors outside of the department for its students.
Support for the plus/minus proposal at the Grad School partially stemmed from a desire to combat the "rise in the terminal masters population" with a more nuanced evaluation system that would allow Brown's grad students to thrive in highly competitive job markets, Bonde told The Herald back in March.
Jonna Iacono GS, president of the GSC, said she believes grad students are largely indifferent to changing the grading policy. Typically grades are less important for grad students than the quality of a final project, such as a dissertation, Iacono said.
Nguyen had a different view on the importance of grades for grad students. "For me grading is very important," he said, adding that other students likely feel the same way.
Iacono summed up her perception of grad student opinion on pluses and minuses pithily when she joked that "grad students want pluses and minuses to grade, but not to be graded."
