Dear Editor:

    As college students, we are encouraged to abandon the idea that letter grades are important in favor of learning as much as we can and building an intellectual foundation for whatever future lies ahead. Personally, I am not one to gripe about specific letter grades. I feel that as long as I have learned a lot from a course and have come out of it better than when I came in, then it has been worthwhile.

    However, I do find it necessary to object to a grading system that makes no rational or practical sense at all. I am talking about the new implementation of minus grades in Loyola’s campus-wide grading system.

    First of all, the minus-grades serve no practical purpose. They don’t give students a chance to earn better grades for the same level of work. Instead, the system actually ends up hurting students who earn lower grades for the same level of work compared to previous years.

    For example, a student who has worked hard enough for what would have been an A in the past can now receive an A- instead. This is because, for the most part, the actual grade ranges have not changed. What has changed is that the lower ranges of each grade are now labeled as minus-grades.

    In the past, it wouldn’t have mattered where a student fell within the A range. They simply would have earned an A. Now, if an A falls in the lower portion of the range, it becomes an A-. This method ends up penalizing students for doing nothing different than before. It seems to be an arbitrary and unnecessary change to a system that wasn’t broken and didn’t need to be fixed.

    With plus-grades already in existence, the result is a cumbersome system with unnecessary demarcations on letter grades that ideally only serve as abstract representations of the real learning that should be taking place anyway.

    This system detracts from the ideal purpose of education as a whole. With both minus and plus marks in play, students will be inclined to be more concerned about rigidly conforming their work to meet the exact expectations of professors who could deal out such grades. The result is contrary to what educators should be trying to achieve: the intellectual growth of individuals over adherence to strict systems of letters and marks.

    The new system also lowers students’ grade point averages compared to a system without minus-grades, which makes the university look worse as a whole.

    All of this leads to the demand that students should have for an answer from whoever devised and signed off on this change. As students, we deserve an answer as to why this change has been made, and it should be a clear, rational and practical answer, not one that points to abstract principles or theoretical values.

Sincerely,
Andy Pham
philosophy senior
[email protected]