The Missouri Students Association is planning to form a committee to meet with Faculty Council to discuss the plus-minus grading system.
Currently, the MU grading system allows for the possibility of 13 different letter grades, including the A plus. Each grade has its own impact on a student’s grade-point average.
“I think it’s very difficult to get a precision that allows you to take a grade and break it up into about (13) parts,” Faculty Council chairman Harry Tyrer said. “That’s a pretty tight precision to be able to grade somebody.”
MSA President Xavier Billingsley has been working on the issue for much of the semester.
“MSA is taking the lead right now,” he said. “MSA was the organization that proposed looking into this.”
Billingsley said he is not a fan of the system, citing there is a major issue with the A plus, which does not give the student extra points above a 4.0 towards his or her GPA.
“I would like to see an intense look over the plus and minus system to have less discrepancies,” Billingsley said.
The MSA committee will be made up of MSA senators, including Academic Affairs committee chairman Ben Levin. Levin said he thinks the committee needs to see where the students are on the issue.
“I’m still trying to figure out how much support there is in the student body for this because it’s not really apparent to me,” he said.
Levin said he believes there is support in MSA to remove the system. Tyrer is not as sure how Faculty Council will respond to the proposed changes.
“I’m going to wait and see how people feel about it,” Tyrer said. “There are some people that feel very strongly that we should support (the plus-minus system) and there are others like myself who really don’t see the value for it.”
Tyrer, an electrical and computer engineering professor, said he does not break up an “A” grade in his classes. Instead, students who earn a grade of a 90 or above get an “A,” or a 4.0 on the GPA scale.
Billingsley also said he does not like the way the current system deals with an “A” grade.
“In a perfect world, I would want to see a fair system where an A was an A no matter what,” he said. “I don’t think you can put a weight on what an A is.”
Billingsley said he believes the current plus-minus grading system can make applying for graduate school more difficult for MU students.
“It needs to be where a student is confident with their GPA,” Billingsley said. “Where they can go into any grad school and have just as good a chance as anybody else.”
