Faculty will have to submit fall semester final grades within 72 hours of their courses’ final examinations after a motion to resolve conflicting deadlines passed at Tuesday’s faculty meeting. For classes without final exams, instructors must submit grades within 72 hours of the end of exam period.
45% of faculty voted in favor of the motion, 30% of faculty voted against and 25% of faculty abstain. The motion — which was postponed at the March faculty meeting, when it was first introduced — will be effective starting July 1, 2023 for subsequent fall semesters.
Previously, the University’s Faculty Rules and Regulations contained two conflicting deadlines for fall semester grade submissions: one within 72 hours of final exams, or 48 hours for courses with final exams on the last day of exam period, and one on Jan. 6, or the preceding Friday when Jan. 6 falls on a weekend. The motion extends the 48-hour deadline to 72 hours and removes mention of the Jan. 6 deadline.
Kenneth Wong, professor of political science, public policy and urban studies, introduced the motion on behalf of the Faculty Executive Committee. Wong said that the change will allow the dean of the College to clarify the academic standing of hundreds of students at risk of “separation from the University” at the end of the fall semester.
President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 then invited faculty members to engage in a discussion on the motion before the vote.
Ross Cheit, professor of political science and public policy, called the motion “mislabeled.”
Cheit distinguished between the “conflicting deadlines” as “a preferred deadline and a final deadline,” and noted that this practice has “worked well in this system, and I don’t see a reason to change it.”
“This motion isn’t to resolve conflicting deadlines,” he said. “This motion is to eliminate the grace period.”
“I teach the kind of courses where people write long papers,” he said. “If this rule goes through, … I’m going to make the deadlines earlier and the result is going to be that those students are going to be faced with December deadlines that make their lives harder.”
James Egan, professor of English, said that the new requirement “is directly affecting the educational experience of every Brown student” that he will teach in the fall. “I will quite literally have to change the nature of my assignments and the nature of my courses,” he said.
Dean of the College Rashid Zia ’01 said that the earlier deadline will prevent “false positives” of students being unnecessarily notified of poor academic standing because their instructors did not submit their grades sooner. He added that dozens of his colleagues spend December and January individually meeting with students at risk of separation from the University, but with the earlier deadline, they would not need to reach out to “at least 600” of these students.
“If we, as instructors, can work to submit our grades before the holidays, then there are hundreds of students who do not have to worry about potentially being separated,” he said. “Then the work of colleagues can focus on those 200 students that really are at risk.”
Dan Katz, senior lecturer in mathematics, said that he has been able to meet the early deadline for “classes where we have hundreds of students taking in-person exams which we then grade in detail with partial credit.”
“Rashid spoke on behalf of students who are waiting to see if they’re separated, which I agree is an extreme thing,” Katz added. “They deserve that information early rather than waiting for us to take the break to decide that information for them.”
Katz also advocated for the implementation of a formal process for requesting exceptions to this deadline for instructors with extenuating circumstances.
Nancy Khalek, associate professor of history and religious studies, spoke against the motion before the discussion was closed for voting.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that folks who teach humanities courses are averse to this change,” she said. “I worry a little bit about this (being) another example of the humanities’ concerns and feelings getting short shrift for the sake of convenience.”
“And I would note that unlike some of our colleagues, those of us in the humanities who are assigning 20 or 25-page papers do not have TAs who can help us grade that sort of thing,” Khalek added. “If we’re forced to do this as a uniform rule, incompletes will skyrocket which just compounds the work that we’re doing after the semester is over, which can also be really problematic.”
Sofia Barnett is a University News editor overseeing the faculty and higher education beat. She is a junior from Texas studying history and English nonfiction and enjoys freelancing in her free time.
