Arts and Sciences Council discusses China, pass/fail policy

Arts and Sciences Council Chair Ruth Day confirmed that the Fuqua phase of Duke’s involvement in China “will be going forward” at the council’s meeting last Thursday.

Day, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, said that although no undergraduate programs in China will be proceeding at this time, the Executive Committee of Arts and Sciences Council will stay informed as conversations continue.

“We are aware of all this and keeping touch, and if anything comes up we will get involved… rather than having it just come to us and have to pass something that we hadn’t vetted,” Day said.

At its meeting, the council decided to convene a committee to review remaining issues in the new pass/fail policy and heard an update on undergraduate research.

Still to be resolved in the new pass/fail policy are how an “unsatisfactory” designation would affect a student’s GPA, whether current pass/fail courses should follow the same grading standards as satisfactory/unsatisfactory courses would and how this policy would work with the new underloading policy.

A subset of the original pass/fail committee will review these issues and report to the council for voting on the policy by March, before bookbagging begins.

Dean Mary Nijhout updated the council on the status of undergraduate student participation in mentored research. She said participation has remained steady at about 47 percent of the last three graduating classes, although the University hopes to see 50 percent participation.

“Whenever someone asks me about the benefits of undergraduate research, I almost always answer first from the perspective of the university,” she said. “The institution isn’t doing [students] any good in any way to exclude them from the faculty work that is going on here.”