Grades will soon be available for students to view online in the form of instructor’s pass rates.
“The grades should be made public; they’re informative for students to make decisions about what courses they are going to enroll in,” Dr. Francisco Arce, vice president of Academic Affairs, said.
Although the system has not yet been made public, students can expect to go on the MyECC Portal and check individual courses and see each instructor’s success and failure rates.
The Web site will be displaying how many students receive As, Bs, Cs, in particular courses.
Not only will this system empower students to make decisions about their education, but it will also benefit the faculty by giving them the opportunity to compare grade distributions.
It will also help them reach agreements on course content and standards, Arce said.
Arce’s goal is that “by the end of this semester it will all be made public” so that students will be able to take advantage of this power as early as the fall semester.
While this may encourage consistent grading among instructors and individual departments, it might also lead to students simply trying to pick professors with the highest success ratios.
“From the students’ standpoint, what they are most likely going to use it for is to identify professors with a generous grading distribution,” Tom Lew, dean of the Humanities Division, said.
The whole system can effectively balance itself out should that never happen, since consistently lower grades can be spotted easier and possibly corrected.
If a professor in a given department has consistently lower marks, they may need to “re-evaluate their grading policies to see if they are rational,” Lew said.
Among students, this may be an opportunity to make easier choices in deciding what courses and what instructors they want to choose.
“Students obviously will look and go for the easier professors,” John Porter, computer science major, said. “It may cause overflow of the easier classes, though.”
For students who might be worried about privacy, their names or grades will be made public, Arce said.