Today, I sat down and wrote a letter to the Academic Senate. Then I saved them a step: I crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. I’m a student, so what I say doesn’t matter.
At least not to them. They are pushing for a controversial grading system based on conjecture, fundamentally flawed studies and willful ignorance of the system’s drawbacks.
The kind of ignorance that comes with failing to entertain the notion that it could possibly have any drawbacks.
Oh, and let’s not forget that their mad scramble to force plus/ minus grading on the District ignores the wants and needs of the students.
In a business, we’d call this practice by a different name: the customer is always wrong.
About 65 percent of De Anza students who participated in a survey conducted by the De Anza Associated Student Body Senate said they opposed the plus/minus grading proposal, according to Glenn Ho, DASB senate vice president of student rights.
Ho said the survey wasn’t statistically perfect, but neither is the plus/minus study conducted by the district last year, something the Academic Senate is using as another talking point in favor of the proposal.
If only it were a real study. Clocking in at five pages, including the cover letter, we can hardly take it seriously. Five pages of confusing text doth not a yearlong study analysis make. The District’s Institutional and Research Planning office refused to release any raw data, but the study’s credibility would still be in the toilet if the district attempted to justify its data.
For all any of us little people know, the alleged data could have been borrowed from a Rice Krispies box.
Eighteen percent of course sections were cited as voluntary participants.
The study lacked a control group or target population, but the report claims the new system would have no significant impact on students. And the report dropped entire groups of students from consideration, considering only those who enrolled in 45 or more units over the course of a year.
Is the district testing office saying only some of us exist? I demand a recount.
“The study found that for 4.00 students with 45 or more attempted units of credit (one full year) about 44 percent earn less than 4.00 under plus/minus grading,” writes Executive Director Bob Barr, before dismissing this as inconsequential. But any 4.0 student can tell you how much it matters.
When University of California Berkeley Coordinator of Outreach Programs and Services Ken Gonsalves was asked Thursday what would deny a 4.0 student admission to Berkeley, he had a two word response: “Nothing else.”
He didn’t say a 4.0 wouldn’t matter.
And yet the district researchers and the Academic Senate imply that 4.0 students don’t.
The Academic Senate hypocritically dismisses opposing arguments while claiming the study proves what they’ve been saying all along: plus/minus will have a negligible impact.
If I could ask Academic Senate President Lydia Hearn just one thing, it would be “Why are you pushing so hard for a system you say won’t really change anything?”
Either the Academic Senate is wasting time that could be better spent helping students or there’s something they are not telling us. It’s the academic equivalent of spending $20 million on a political campaign to support renaming California to The Land of Apple and Hewlett-Packard, while claiming it doesn’t matter to anyone what the name is.
And they are willing to shoot down valid points, like the 20.5 percent drop in transfers Gavilan College suffered after switching to the same system.
When addressing the DASB Senate on Wednesday, former Academic Senate president Dan Mitchell said neither the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or a Gavilan College researcher could find any evidence of a drop in Gavilan’s transfer rate. He said the researcher at Gavilan was mystified and didn’t know anything about a drop.
Moments later, Hearn piped up, saying even if there had been a drop, it should have happened about three years after the change.
In 2002, Gavilan College’s research office published a report citing the drop, available online at www.gavilan.edu/research/reports/ indicators.pdf.
According to the report, Gavilan’s UC and CSU transfers went from 204 in the 98-99 academic year to 162 in 99-00, sustaining a 20.5 percent drop the same year it implemented the new system.
Of course, if the Board of Trustees holds to the promises trustees made prior to approving the district study, it will dismiss plus/minus grading as an option. If it hurts even one student, we will not vote for it, the board members said.
Take it from me. It hurts.