For my interviews, I decided to speak with a UF pre-med professor, UF Chemistry TA, and a third-year UF Chemical Engineering student.
In my interview with the UF Pre-Med professor, he mentioned that completely changing the grading system at the university would be very absurd. He emphasized the need of weeding out the students who couldn't handle the difficult prerequisite courses so the department could only keep the best to pursue their major and remain successful in med school. He explained that an alternative to a changing grade system would be to allow more resources like Study Edge and Smokin Notes to be available to students. He also encouraged students to take advantage of the free tutors at the Broward Teacher Center and office hours. Lastly, he did not want the standard of the university to go down with the "easier" grading policy.
The chemistry TA I interviewed with agreed with my idea. She said that when students have low pass rates it reflects poorly on her performance as a TA too. The professor looks very closely at their students pass rates in each of the TA's section for the course. However, she suggested that when presenting the official proposal to the UF Registrar, the signatories should be students with high GPA's so the university does not think that students with low GPA's are the only ones trying to reform.
The last person I interviewed was a third-year chemical engineering student. She thought my idea was good, however she was concerned about how we were going to propose this to the UF Registrar. Therefore, she suggested that we should have a petition signed and get a certain amount of signatures so then we can present this proposal to the UF Registrar so they can hopefully consider making some changes.
In the interviews, my interviewees were concerned with proposal and the standard of the university. The proposal is a main concern because since UF is a top 10 public school, it is difficult to propose a grading system that allows students to have a higher chance in passing their classes.
Hello Sara,
ReplyDeleteI can see how teachers would be concerned with the potential lowering of the University’s standard. Certainly, students and teachers have very opposite perspectives; you should keep that in mind going further into the opportunity
Sara,
ReplyDeleteYour opportunity of changing the grading system will be beneficial for many UF students. I was reading your interview with the UF Pre-Med professor and I wanted to add that as they are many resources available to a student in order to pass the course, I recently heard that professors (specifically for General Chemistry 1) are encouraging students to not use Study Edge and rather utilize the textbooks and lecture notes more. However, UF wants every student to become successful so they purposely make students work hard to earn their degree.
Hey Sara,
ReplyDeleteI can definitely see both sides in this situation. I do think it is important to maintain rigorous course work at UF in order to keep our standards high; however, I do disagree with a lot of the teaching styles and ways to get information at UF (possibly college altogether). I think it is unfortunate that many of us have to rely on additional study aid instead of the professor's lecture and the textbook. I feel as though it is getting to the point where a lot of us just teach ourselves the material and that is where I see a disconnect between student and university.