University of Virginia Library

Pluses And Minuses Again

Some years ago a good friend of ours spent
over an hour attempting to persuade a
professor who had given him a D for a French
course to raise that grade. After presenting a
barrage of arguments the professor reluctantly
agreed to raise this student's grade and the
latter left Cabell Hall with visions of a C or
even a B- in his head. One can imagine the
student's distress when he discovered, upon
receiving his grades, that his French grade had
been raised from a D to a D+. In those days
pluses and minuses did not mean a great deal.

But they might this semester. Last year the
faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences
approved a new curriculum which included,
among other things, a provision for giving a
numerical value of .3 for each plus and
subtracting that sum for a minus. In late April
of last semester the faculty Committee on
Educational Policy and the Curriculum had
plans to present a proposal rescinding the
plus-minus provision, but the ROTC report
and the strike forced a postponement of that
motion and the provision went into effect in
the fall.

On Tuesday the Committee on
Educational Policy and the Curriculum will
again present their proposal to drop the
plus-minus computation from a student's
grade point average. There is no reason for
that motion not to pass. It is a trend at most
colleges and universities these days to
de-emphasize a student's grades. Some schools
have done away with grades altogether.

Ideally at any school students and faculty
should strive for intellectual truth, but
inevitably students grind for the elusive grade
first, and retention of knowledge and full
learning second. The implementation of the
pass-fail option this fall was a step towards
fulfillment of the idea; the retention of a
numerical equivalent for a plus of a minus
would be alien to that same ideal. Students
cannot help but feel that a professor's
decision with either a plus or a minus can be
so arbitrary as to be ridiculous.

The Committee on Educational Policy and
the Curriculum has studied this matter
carefully and has discovered, to no one's
surprise, that most students are against these
graded equivalents. With exams and final
grades a little more than a month away it is
time to restore pluses and minuses to their old
status of garnishments. We urge the faculty of
the College to do just that this Tuesday.