By Clyde Noel

There is a movement underway at the Foothill-De Anza Community College District to change the grading policy for students and maintain academic integrity. Part of the proposal is to include pluses and minuses with letter grades.

The responsibility to change any grading system lies with the District’s board. A group of faculty and students presented their case to the board Nov. 18 for consideration. No action was taken on the proposal, but Chancellor Leo Chavez, who will be replaced by Lois Callahan next month, suggested everybody should find out where they stand.

“I don’t agree in principle,” said Sandy Hay, president of the board. “What is it of value to do this? It seems to me it is impossible that all faculty members will agree to a plus-minus system. It leads to inconsistency.”

Board member Paul Fong said the individual faculty member determines the grade and that there is no way to show that one ‘A’ is better than another .

“Values and integrity determine a grade and not a plus and a minus,” Hay said.

The argument in favor of a plus/minus grading system is that it makes the process of grading fairer to students by providing higher resolution on grades. Under the current system at De Anza, students who an instructor considers to have a 1-percent difference in performance may be given a 25-percent difference in grade points.

Meanwhile a student who the instructor considers to have a 10-percent or more difference in performance may be given the same grade. The addition of more grades to the grading system would make each individual assignment more likely to affect a student’s grade and as a result may motivate them to do better work.

Larry Miller, District Academic Senate president, said a new system would better prepare transfer students. All eight campuses within the University of California System use a plus/minus system as do 17 of the 22 State University campuses. Stanford University also uses a plus/minus system of grading.

If implemented, Miller said that Foothill-De Anza would be the first California community college to adopt a plus and minus system.

Mary Mason, board vice president, said that there is a lack of uniformity by the entire faculty at De Anza and Foothill. “I need assurance that everyone is on the same rating scale:”

Paul Stares, an English teacher at De Anza, commented that any grading system is less than perfect and that the current system at Foothill is not a satisfactory system for an instructor.

The argument against the plus/minus system is that when there are more grades, the faculty puts a greater emphasis on grading and achievement, which takes away the emphasis on learning. By adding eight more grade levels to the five that are already established would create a false impression of how accurately grades can measure student performance.

“I can’t see where anything new is in the proposal since the last time you brought this in front of the board,” said Mason.

In 1998, the De Anza Academic Senate conducted a dry run of the plus/minus grading system where instructors were asked to include pluses and minuses to the student grades as a personal record while using letter grades for official grading.

At the end of the study, it was determined that under the hypothetical grading system the grade point average of the graded students was 0.003 percent, a grade point lower than what they would have received under the current grading system.