Long-awaited by some and dreaded by others, the new plus/minus grading system will go into effect this fall after more than a decade of waiting and debate.
Plus/minus will undergo a three-year trial period, bioengineering professor and outgoing Academic Senate President Tony Garcia said. He urged every department on campus to keep track of its use of the system, so that ASU can "see if things change and see if it is working the way people think it should work."
Among a team of people around ASU that worked on the details of the scale for two years, Garcia called the new system a "compromise."
"This past year we've debated the implementation and the many details, like transfer credits and graduation honor status, but I think we've reached a reasonable conclusion," Garcia said.
The system will give the option to professors to add a plus or minus to a student's final letter grade, although there will be no C-minus, D-plus or D-minus. There can be no GPA higher than 4.0 on a student's official transcript, and the posting of pass/fail courses will not change.
The College of Law will not use the new scale but will continue to use its numeric scale.
The Academic Senate voted in 1992 to implement a more specific grading scale, but ASU lacked the technology to put one into effect.
An agreement to look at the feasibility of a system again in 10 years was created, and discussions began again in 2002 with vocal support from faculty and complaints from students.
Numerous additions and revisions of the scale were made since the original 1992 recommendation, due in large part to an outcry from many students who did not want the grading scale they started college with to change.
One of the main concerns students had was the lack of an A-plus, which ASU President Michael Crow added when he approved the scale in July 2003.
The addition to the original system professors wanted was a uniform system, so students in the same course doing the same amount of work would not receive different grades because one was affected by plus/minus and the other was not.
Garcia said that the system will likely not be used in all classes, but that smaller ones may continue to use a simple A, B, C, D or E.
"It will be very different from class to class," he said. "I wouldn't expect to see a full scale in a small class, as the expectations of what will reflect performance are very different from what is expected in a large class."
UA remains the only university in the Pac-10 not to use a plus/minus grading system.
The lack of technology to update the system -- the real reason it was delayed so long -- no longer exists, and the system is "up and ready to go," said William Lewis, chief information officer and vice provost for Information Technology.
"The whole student information system had to be changed, as we had a single character that would show up in the database and on the screens, and that had to be changed to add the plus and minus options," Lewis said.
Lewis and his team worked for about a year to develop code to accommodate inserting a plus or minus, which involved changing and testing over three million lines of code.
"It had to be done, so we assigned the staff to do it, and we finished it in time," he said.
A complete report of the new system is available online at the Academic Senate's homepage: http://www.asu.edu/provost/asenate/
Reach the reporter at annemarie.moody@asu.edu.
