In its weekly meeting, the SGA Undergraduate Student Congress saw two bills related to OU Engage, and a resolution in support of pass/no pass grading for the fall 2020 semester.
Author of the resolution, University Policy committee chair Crispin South, shared the concerns of some OU students to emphasize the importance of adopting the pass/no pass policy. He said nearly 3,400 people have signed the pass/no pass petition, and several shared their stories in the comments of the petition.
South omitted the names of the students for privacy. He said one student said most professors and students are not properly equipped for a sudden shift to nearly all online work.
“Simply because students have months to notice that certain classes will be online, that does not mean they were magically able to be more prepared. Not only has the pandemic worsened, but the strenuous nature of the virus has stretched students in terms of their time and in terms of their health,” the student said. “This pandemic is not what I am capable of. This pandemic is an example of what I can do when my mental and physical health is pushed past its limit, not what I can do as a healthy and focused student. To ignore the concerns of students and write this off is to essentially let us drown in our own nightmares.”
“I'm a single mom homeschooling a child, can we please not tank my GPA my senior year?,” another student wrote.
South said there are students across campus who are suffering academic harm through no fault of their own. He mentioned last semester’s pass/no pass policy, as well the policy of this semester, is designed to help students who are trying their hardest in classes but are simply overwhelmed.
“After talking with the faculty senate and studying the plans of other universities that are adopting pass/no pass policies for this semester, we've determined that it would be more harmful to students to allow these as passing rates,” South said. “We'd like to have (the student senate) on board with this as well, just so that we can jointly make a recommendation to the provost office and have this be as strong of a plan as possible to try and do the most good we can for students on this campus.”
Laura Gibbs, online instructor in the College of Arts and Sciences and advocate for the pass/no pass grading system, said in a previous interview with The Daily the pass/no pass policy should be given to students again this fall.
“That's an option that we should make available to students, especially if we want them to go along with the quarantine rule,” Gibbs said. “If you're sitting there thinking, ‘Should I quarantine and possibly not do as well in the class?' or 'Should I just go to class and, you know, pretend I'm not quarantining?’ We should take the grade factor out of the equation there if we can.”
According to last semester’s grading policy, all course grades of D or better at the undergraduate level would convert to pass, and course grades of C or better at the graduate level would convert to pass. The only proposed difference from the pass/no pass policy last semester is that at the undergraduate level, all grades of C or higher are convertible to a pass, while grades of D or lower are convertible to a no-pass, according to the Congress agenda.
The congress passed the pass/no pass resolution with a roll call vote of 29-0-1.
Congress also saw the “Farewell OrgSync Act of 2020,” a bill that updated the SGA “OrgSync'' platform to Engage in SGA’s Code Annotated. The bill passed with a final roll call of 29-0-0.
The “Bye-Bye OrgSync Act of 2020” functioned the same as the aforementioned bill, but updated the platform in the congress bylaws. It passed with a final roll call of 29-0-0.
Congress discussed the “Auxiliary Allocation 6 Act of 2020-2021,” a bill that appropriates SGA funds to student organizations on campus. This particular allocation appropriates SGA funds to the Asian American Student Association. The bill passed with a final roll call of 29-0-0.
The meeting ended with South being applauded by Congress members for his hard work on the pass/no pass bill.
“Personally, I believe that telling students to suck it up and deal with poor GPAs for mental health and a global pandemic is unbelievably cruel,” South said “That's why this resolution is here today."
