D+ and D- removal to be discussed

The Academic Policies committee will make the final recommendation to the president by the end of the semester regarding the removal of D- and D+ grades from the AUBG grading scale. The recommendation, if accepted by the president, will be effective as of the Fall semester, Dean of Faculty Steven Sullivan said.

According to a defacto article titled "D to be removed as a grade" by Ledia Pelivani published in defacto’s Issue 46, the original recommendation was the removal of the whole D scale, which includes the D grade as well. However, the information listed is incorrect and it followed from a misunderstanding between Pelivani and Sullivan.

The original recommendation of the Academic Policies committee was the removal of the D- grade. After discussing the proposal with the Curriculum Committee, Sullivan decided to send the recommendation back to the Academic Policies committee as it was the general opinion of the Curriculum Committee members that the D+ is unnecessary as well, Sullivan said.

"I as a professor didn’t use pluses and minuses on Ds. If somebody didn’t earn a C-, and they didn’t deserve F, so would get a D. […] D+ I suppose I could live with, but D- just seems to me to be almost insulting because what a D means is unsatisfactory, so if you get a D- you aren’t good enough to be called unsatisfactory," Sullivan said.

If the new grading scale without D- and D+ gets approved by the president, AUBG will go from C- (1.67) to D (1.00) and F when it comes to calculating the GPA. "If we pile all the D-, D, D+ grades, we are still talking about 3-4 percent of all the grades," Sullivan added.

"During our last meeting in December, we agreed to propose to the Faculty Assembly [FA] the elimination of D- as a grade because it doesn’t serve any purpose to either the students [or] the professors," Andrea Ivanovic, student representative to the Academic Policies committee said.

"The only thing we did was to discuss this possibility at a Faculty Assembly meeting, but nothing was decided by the FA or [the] administration," Diego Lucci, chairman of the Faculty Assembly, said. "D- is still a grade at AUBG," Lucci added.

"I think that we all can do much better than having D- because this grade counts as less than 1.00 and it diminishes the [cumulative GPA] as well as our potential as students and also the University’s reputation," Ivanovic said.