Attachment A-1

Faculty Senate Agenda

February 25, 2010

SUMMARY OF MAJOR / SUBSTANTIVE CHANGES TO THE UNIVERSITY’S STUDENT GRADE APPEAL PROCESS

October 26, 2009

Proposed change: University constitutes several grade appeal panels composed of faculty appointed by the President on the recommendation of the Faculty Senate and including students recommended by ASI if it chooses to do so. Each panel will be composed of at least two faculty and a student. If a member or alternate is unavailable, the panel will proceed with a quorum of two.

Management of formal grade appeals to be located in the office of Academic Affairs.

The Student Issues Coordinator, if a Bargaining Unit III member, or a faculty member reporting to the Coordinator to act as principal advisor to students on grade appeals. Ultimate decision to go to trial remains with the panel.

The Coordinator or faculty member reporting to the Coordinator should be sufficiently familiar with The Student Grade Appeal Process and the Committee to recognize when a student hasn’t a chance of prevailing in a grade appeal so as to discourage frivolous claims effectively.

Advantages:

a. Removes recruiting of grade appeal panels entirely from departments without tasking the Colleges.

b. Employs well-established procedures for recruiting faculty and students (however ineffective in the students’ case) to constitute University committees.

c. Stabilizes panel membership by extending terms of service. If faculty and student memberships are for staggered terms of three or two years (in the case of some students) respectively, the panels may gradually build institutional memory of how they handle grade appeals involving various types of factual claims. (These claims are not so unique that they display no uniformities at all. In fact, they tend to vary but not so much as to be unclassifiable as to general type.)

d. May improve the writing of a panel’s findings of fact to support its decision of a grade appeal. If it does, the student’s and the instructor’s right to reasons for the decision, be it adverse or not, would be more closely respected.

e. Centralizes the advising function in connection with grade appeals and permits the advisor to acquire a measure of expertise and institutional memory from working with the policy and the panels to inform the advising.

f. Reduces delay caused by having to constitute panels as needed.

g. Reduces the likelihood that frivolous cases will reach a panel for trial because the advisor has persuaded the student to drop a frivolous claim or a claim that cannot be brought within the grounds for appeal stated in the Process.

h. Makes possible the training of the panels in fact-finding and application of general policy statements to the facts found to derive a judgment of the student’s claim.

i. May improve the entire management of the grade appeal process by enabling one manager to gain experience and therefore efficiency over time.

j. May thereby reduce the number of procedural appeals arising from claims of mismanagement and thereby the delay of a final and binding decision of the grade appeal underlying each procedural appeal..

k. Provides for prompt decision of an appeal of a grade in a course needed to graduate immediately.

Disadvantages:

a. Removes grade appeals from a more local setting to a more distant one, thereby reducing perceived access to the process.

b. Removes the advising function and the action of the panel from the department’s “culture of grading” if, as some claim, this exists in every department and is in some sense knowable to the panelists from outside the department.

c. Vests decision of grade appeals in a panel whose membership will not be limited to the College or even in the case of one of the faculty on the panel that decides the appeal, to the department from which the appeal came.

d. Tasks Academic Affairs with providing staff support for the panels to the extent word processing on one’s own computer or e-mail won’t serve.

e. Requires Academic Affairs to provide a place for students to meet with the faculty member advising students about grade appeals unless the advisor’s faculty office will serve. Staff will also be required in Academic Affairs to schedule appointments with the advisor wherever the meeting is to occur.

f. May increase delay as to the disposition of a particular case if one or more are ahead of it on a panel’s agenda.

g. Regrading following on a decision to disallow a grade may be delayed if the instructor delays or refuses to act at all and faculty must be recruited by the department apart from the University panel to regrade without having anticipated the need to do so. Even if the instructor regrades promptly, the reasonableness review of that revised grade by the panel may be delayed somewhat if the panel is working on another appeal when the regrading is submitted for a reasonableness review.

h. A panel may have to meet promptly after a term ends to decide an appeal of a grade in a course needed to graduate immediately.