SASKATOON -- A University of Saskatchewan (U of S) student has started an online petition asking the school to take a different approach to final grades during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Morgan Mutschler, a first-year engineering student, is asking for students to have the option to choose between a final letter grade or a pass or fail grade for 2020 winter classes, similar to the systems recently put in place at the University of Regina and universities in Alberta.
This comes after the U of S switched to online classes and labs in place of in-person classes and labs from March 19 until the end of the term because of the pandemic.
“The level of teaching isn’t the same at home as it would be in class. You can’t directly ask the professors questions and when you email them, sometimes the responses from them aren’t as quick as they would be in a face-to-face situation,” said Mutschler.
He said online classes could also put some students at an unfair disadvantage and cause them to fall behind.
“If you’re working from home, there could be family interference, you could have limited access to a computer and those things together just make it a little bit more difficult to learn online and this is going to affect the grades of a lot of the students,” Mutschler said.
The petition was started two days ago and already has almost 1,500 signatures.
“Within the first 24 hours, I had about 1,000 supporters for it, so it just shows the amount of support that this cause is getting. And I feel because of that level of support, something should and likely will be done about this,” Mutschler said.
Patti McDougall, the university's vice-provost of teaching, learning and student experience, said there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach for grading, adding the schools’ top priority is to do what is best for students.
“After considering options, we decided that standard grading practices serves the best interests of students — both in terms of properly assessing learning, and safe-guarding degree progression,” McDougall said in a statement to CTV News.
This means the university plans to continue with its typical grading practices for the rest of the term.
“This decision helps to ensure that large sectors of the student body will not be placed at an academic disadvantage,” she continued.
McDougall said the only exception to this is the Juris Doctor program within the College of Law, which will be adopting a new grading mode for classes completed within the 2020 winter term. It is unclear whether this will be a pass or fail model.
