​High marks for pass/fail courses

At the beginning of this semester, the Imagining the Duke Curriculum Committee proposed a conceptual framework for reworking Duke’s undergraduate curriculum. Among the questions the committee considers going forward is how they can design a “robust pass/fail policy to further promote academic experimentation.” Improvements presented as part of the new curriculum have the potential to be part of Duke’s counterbalance against the pre-professionalism we discussed yesterday.

Duke’s current pass/fail course policy allows students to receive a satisfactory or unsatisfactory grade in one class per semester above a four credit schedule. Currently, a letter grade class may be changed to pass/fail only through the week after the end of drop/add period. No pass/fail courses count towards GPA, but four of them may count towards credits for graduation. Students may also audit classes, receiving no credit but also not having to turn in any assignments or take any exams.

These policies are intended to encourage students to explore new areas without fear that they are passing up on grabbing easy A’s while they still can. In the interest of Duke’s mission to “promote an intellectual environment built on a commitment to free and open inquiry,” Duke students need to be pushed to take classes and meet students and professors outside of their comfort zone or major cluster.

We offered several suggestions when the Arts and Sciences council last considered changing our pass/fail policies in 2009. Duke Student Government is currently considering four different options to mandate pass/fail classes for first-years. One plan mirrors schools such as MIT, Johns Hopkins and Brown, which require all pass/fail classes first semester. While this plan prevents students from being discouraged by early math classes and difficult introductory level courses, Duke has traditionally given first-years a great deal of leeway with class difficulty with FOCUS programs, the first-year seminar and Writing 101. Improved pre-enrollment summer advice by peers or academic advisors would better serve students than a blanket pass/fail policy.

The other options presented by DSG seem like arbitrary permutations of pass/fail classes rather than deliberate policy-making. We believe the first-year experience as is and particularly as the new curriculum unfolds is sufficient for the time being. The focus needs to be on students throughout their careers. As students progress in their majors, students ought to be encouraged to take core or higher elective classes outside of their majors. The ground-level introduction to other fields offers the eager student great value for time spent in terms of understanding the competencies and tools of other disciplines. We maintain that departments should be able to individually decide whether core classes can be taken under these policies by both majors and non-majors.

Additionally, it seems only sensible that students going above and beyond with a fifth class should be able to drop that class down to pass/fail or audit as late in the semester as they desire. Such an extension would only serve to encourage students to seriously seek out a class purely for the purposes of exploration that they can stick with for a whole semester without fear of being somehow trapped. For students who wish to freely explore other languages, those departments should be open on a case-by-case basis to allowing students to take their core courses under these policies.

In this spirit, clearly defined and well-advertised audit and pass/fail systems will encourage students to take classes more daringly, making Duke’s curriculum that much more unique in its promotion of the liberal arts and cross-disciplinary exploration.