FAYETTEVILLE -- The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville will allow undergraduate students to choose a pass/no credit grading option after receiving letter grades for their spring semester courses, the university announced Thursday.
"Students will be assigned a letter grade with the flexibility to request to have their grade changed to a pass, pass with a D, or no credit (NC). Graduate students may apply through their degree programs for a similar system, and law students will move to a pass/fail policy," Chancellor Joe Steinmetz said in an email to campus.
UA joins some other large public universities in making similar changes to expand pass/fail grading as colleges have moved to remote instruction in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
Steinmetz also said in his email that UA learned Thursday of a housing employee testing positive for covid-19. The worker "had not been on campus since March 26 and while all staff have been practicing social distancing, out of an abundance of caution, the staff working with this individual were also sent home for the time being as a preventive measure," Steinmetz said.
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The university had previously announced a closure date of today for its campus housing, with exceptions for students in need. A university spokesman, Mark Rushing, said in an email that the worker's job "does not require direct contact with students."
Rushing referred a question about whether any on-campus students are in quarantine to the state Department of Health, which did not answer a question submitted Thursday night by the Democrat-Gazette.
Steinmetz said in his email that the grading policy decision was made with "input from the Faculty Senate Executive Committee (and lots of student feedback)."
By Thursday evening, an online petition seeking to have UA change to pass/fail grading for spring courses had more than 9,000 signatures.
"Some people thrive in courses online and others greatly struggle without the in class resources we had before," states the petition, started by Presley Hope.
Barrett Weidman, 20, a sophomore chemical engineering major, was among those to sign the petition.
"We're not really getting the educational experience that we paid for," Weidman said.
Students and faculty members both must adjust to the online-only courses, she said.
"With a change this big, a lot of people feel uncomfortable," Weidman said, adding that some students now are in homes crammed with younger, noisy siblings.
She described big differences among faculty members in how they're teaching her courses.
In one course, a professor has "done a good job adjusting to Zoom for us to have live lectures," Weidman said, referring to the video conferencing online application.
She said in another technical course, a professor is not giving video lectures but instead sending students lecture notes.
"I don't think he maybe has the technology in his home, or maybe he doesn't know how," Weidman said, though she added that he's made himself available online for questions from students.
In the class, "we're just being taught less and expected to learn more ourselves," Weidman said.
Before Thursday's announcement, the undergraduate Associated Student Government issued a statement in support of an opt-in pass/no credit grading system.
James "JD" DiLoreto-Hill, president of UA's Graduate-Professional Student Body, said in an email earlier in the week that "there is some anxiety over the unknown" for graduate students.
"Because of licensure issues (nursing, counseling, social work, etc.) some programs simply cannot allow passing grades for anything less than an 80. So it will be completely decided by individual program directors, which is leaving many unsure about what that will mean individually," DiLoreto-Hill said.
Among similar universities in nearby states, the University of Missouri on Monday announced that it was expanding its pass/fail grading for the spring by allowing students to decide after receiving their letter grades whether to keep the grades or select satisfactory/unsatisfactory grading.
In Arkansas, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith have moved to expand credit/no credit grading for spring courses.