During a series of emergency meetings held over spring break, members of the College Curriculum Council drafted a new proposal to revise the University's grading system, outlining a more detailed array of possible notations that could appear on students' transcripts. Students will now be evaluated on a scale ranging from gold stars to neon green Mr. Yuk stickers.
Following the vote against the addition of pluses and minuses to Brown's grading system, members of the CCC opted to change their spring break plans late last month. All 13 members convened in Kingston, Jamaica, for what Luther Spoehr, lecturer in education and vice chair of the CCC, termed a "five-day power brainstorming session."
"There was a sense that we really needed to mix things up," said Spoehr, who wore a t-shirt proclaiming "Jamaica me want to prevent students from gaming the system and cheapening their educations" for the duration of the retreat.
Spoehr expressed satisfaction with the CCC's final proposal, praising in particular the scale's arbitrary nature. According to partial drafts leaked to The Herald via e-mail, the middle ranges of the scale will vary not only by department, but also by individual professor and, potentially, from student to student.
Professor of Biology Jonathan Waage, a member of the CCC, expressed a grudging satisfaction with the proposed system. "I mean, ideally, students' transcripts would reflect the entirety of their emotional knowledge and spiritual karma, but I guess this system works better than the standing one," he said.
Waage's contribution to the proposal was a series of smiley faces with varying angles of smile curve that "no one really understands but him," according to CCC member Freya Zaheer '06, whose bid to include 1980s-style "scratch and sniff" stickers in the proposal was ultimately unsuccessful.
"The point, really, is to keep students on their toes," Spoehr said. "You can't game something that's not rooted in reality."
Members of the CCC offered varying accounts of how the system was originally conceived. Evidently, after two days of unsuccessful negotiations, Dean of the College and CCC Chair Paul Armstrong abandoned the group to "go in search of some adventure," according to Zaheer. He returned 36 hours later with the fundamentals of the revised system scrawled on his forearm. Council members ironed out the details during the trip's final days.
Armstrong told The Herald he is reluctant to divulge the details of his mini-excursion. "I can't do justice to what I saw out there," he said. "Suffice to say, I returned a changed man. I really put myself back in touch with the spirit of the New Curriculum."
Upon returning to Providence, the CCC will recommend that the Faculty Executive Committee vote on the proposal. If approved, it will go before the full faculty later this month. A series of University-wide forums discussing the pros and cons of the new system - originally scheduled to take place in Salomon 101 - will instead take place next week in Perkins Lounge, a locale that "directly corresponds to student interest in the matter," Armstrong said.
Initial straw polling conducted by the Sheridan Center for Teaching revealed that a resounding 90 percent of faculty support the adoption of the new system. While these numbers reflect only the responses of 30 professors who had to complete an obstacle course and academic decathlon officiated by Spoehr before obtaining access to the survey, proponents of the new system hope to use these numbers as a central talking point in debates over the next few weeks.
