Faculty Guidance

Adjustments to policies and deadlines

All Spring 2020 courses at Washington College will be graded pass/fail. Our current student information software doesn’t allow us to record different kinds of grades for different students in the same course. In other words, whether a course is pass/fail or letter-graded is a course-level designation, not a student-level designation. So a system in which students can choose whether to get letter grades or pass/fail grades is not possible.

However, we will have a record of all students’ letter grades and semester grade point average for Spring 2020 (they are entered in a field that doesn’t contribute information to students’ transcripts). So we will use those letter grades for all internal purposes, such as determining students’ academic standing, monitoring GPAs for scholarship eligibility or determining students’ eligibility for honor societies and study abroad.

We will also be able to produce an official letter certifying your Spring semester letter grades and GPA. Once you have your semester GPA, you will be able to calculate your cumulative GPA (https://www.washcoll.edu/offices/registrar/gpa-calculation.php). We are happy to send this letter to students or to send it with your transcript if you need it to apply for an internship, summer program, job or graduate or professional school.

Our priority is creating these letters for graduating seniors. Letters for members of the classes of ’21, ’22 and ’23 will be available by July 15. But if you need this letter before July 15, please contact [email protected] or [email protected].

All the colleges and universities in the country face the same issues with the sudden transition to online course work and the disruption of grading. For instance, at a college that offered students the choice of letter grades or pass/fail, there will be students who opted for pass/fail and then later need to show their letter grades, eg, for a grad school application. So their Registrar’s Office will have to produce something like the letter I describe. Having an official letter verifying your Spring 2020 letter grades won’t put you at a disadvantage compared to students at other colleges.

Software

Library and Academic Technology staff are working with all faculty whose students need access to specialized software (SPSS, SAP, etc) or other specialized library materials such as DVDs for their courses. If you have any difficulty accessing software you would have had access to on campus, please contact Dean Mary Alice Ball.