Students voiced their overwhelming disapproval for the proposed Achievement Index grading system in a referendum included on the ballot during Thursday's Duke Student Government elections.
Of the students who voted on the referendum-which asked, "Should Duke adopt the achievement index as a new method of computing students' grade point average (GPA) and class rank?"-88.3 percent voted "no" and 11.7 percent "yes."
"I think [the results] reflect an informed student body," said Trinity senior Takcus Nesbit, DSG president. "The 88 percent reflects their overall disenchantment with the idea, not because they are grade grubbers, but because they realize it's not a good policy."
Nesbit added that he hopes the Arts and Sciences Council will take the results of the referendum under consideration in future deliberations on the AI.
The most common reason students gave for opposing the AI was fear that it would exacerbate the problem of competition among students.
"I definitely will vote against it," said Trinity sophomore Anna Metz. "It would change the whole dynamic of the University [as] it would increase the competition between the students."
Trinity junior Matthew Cloues agreed. "A lot of learning is done in group work, and the Achievement Index is not good for group work," he said. "In the real world, people are going to have to work together, and the Achievement Index encourages competitiveness."
Trinity senior Isabella Fiorentino said she opposes the AI not only because she was afraid that it would increase competition, but also because the index would influence people's choices of classes and cause them not to take the classes in which they are genuinely interested.
A few students said they opposed the AI in principle, regardless of its implementation.
"I disagree with [the AI's] goal," said Trinity junior Alon Neches. "[Its goal is] to try to create a statistical scale on which all of us are ranked and to value our educations based on it." He said he would ideally prefer a system that attempted to take into account "the subtleties and intangible aspects" of an education.
Engineering senior Sanjay Vanguri, who said he hopes to get into a medical school that grades students on a pass/fail basis, said he also opposes the AI because he opposes the entire notion of grades. "The environment is a lot better when there are no rankings," he said. "And the AI is just one more way of trying to definitively rank people."
Trinity senior Jesse Roach, however, said his vote for the AI was more a condemnation of the current grading system than an expression of confidence in the AI.
"I think that right now the system is unfair," Roach said. "While [the AI] might not be the right system, it is a step in the right direction. [The current system] assumes all classes are the same. The truth is that some classes are harder than others, either because of the professors' grading or the material in the course."
Trinity sophomore Andra Greenberg said she felt the information made available to students in The Chronicle and other student publications had been too biased for her to make a fair decision. "I probably won't vote on it because I don't know enough about it," she said.
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