Last semester, Mount Allison University implemented a pass/fail option for students.
Students had the option to keep their mark, or have “P” for “Pass,” “CP” for “Conditional Pass,” or “F” for “Fail” on their official transcript.
The Mount Allison Student Union is pushing to revive the pass/fail option for students this semester.
Jon Ferguson: We’re currently considering calling an emergency meeting of the University Senate to push for a pass/fail option for students. It was something that we have been hearing from many students they’d like to see this semester. So today, we put up an informal Instagram poll, also a Facebook poll. We got several hundred responses. And so far the feedback we’re looking at is a nearly unanimous response. It’s about 95% so far that students would like to see this as an option. Whether it be for them or their peers this semester, similar to how it was last semester.
Ferguson says the MASU Instagram poll got between 500 and 600 responses, the majority of which were in favour of the pass/fail option.
Last semester, the majority of students were required to choose between a letter grade or the pass/fail option before their final marks were available to them.
Ferguson says that is unacceptable.
JF: This is something that we think has to be changed. It really defeats the purpose of giving students an option to opt into pass/fail, if the purpose there is to reduce stress. Really all you’re doing is creating more stress, right? You know, it’s the lead up to exam week, and people are running through all these calculations based on grades they have or haven’t received or think they might have done well on or might not have done well on… that adds stress and is a distraction from focusing on their final assignments or their final exams. It’s really, really, really important to us that Mount Allison follow the lead of nearly every other university in Canada that’s done the pass/fail system, and also allow students to choose pass/fail after their final marks come in. I really want to underline that that point I made there, that like Mount Allison is, to the best of our knowledge, one of the very few if not the only universities in Canada, that in March decided to make students choose whether or not they do pass/fail before their final marks came out. This is not what most universities were doing, and there’s a reason for that. We understand that there might have been reasoning, or it might not have seemed like a very severe detail at the time, but we insist that students have told us it is.
Students with concerns or questions about the pass/fail option and what it might mean for them should get in contact with the MASU.