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Highlights of the College Park Senate meeting on Dec 12, 2005

• Topic 1 was a proposal for campus-wide online course evaluation. Concerns were expressed, about separating student-interest questions from personnel-evaluation questions (used in APT), about how to increase student participation, etc. The proposal eventually passed with an amendment that it will come back to the senate after the provost's office solidifies particulars (e.g., what questions to ask). So in the near future it will come back to the senate and presumably be approved.
  
  
• Topic 2 was a proposal for instituting numerical values for the plus/minus letter grades (i.e., A+ = 4.3, A=4, A-=3.7, ...). Currently, the plus/minus attributes do not affect the numerical GPA (i.e., A+, A, A- all equal 3). This looks odd to outsiders; in fact, some of them recompute the GPA assigning their own numerical values to the plus/minus attributes. There was an amendment to not apply the numerical changes to C-, D+, and D-, i.e., to have C+=2 and D+=D=D-=1. The justification supplied for having D+=D=D-=1 was that nobody cares about these distinctions in D. The motivation for having C+=2 was so that programs would not have to re-examine/re-state current requirements (e.g., requiring a grade of C- in a prerequisite, a ug gpa of 2 to avoid dismissal, etc.). The debate went on and on: grade inflation, grade deflation, B- should be treated like C- since B- is like C- for grads, .... There was even talk of eliminating plus/minus completely. I left around 5:15 so I can't tell you what happened here.

Udaya Shankar