Midterm grades will be available for all undergraduate studentsstarting fall semester.
Academic Regulation 88 passed by a vote of 15 to 11 in the Faculty Senate earlier this week. The regulation states that midterm grades will be submitted Wednesday of the eighth week in the fall and spring semesters. The regulation requires A through F grades to be submitted to serve as an indication of a student’s progress.
Achieving midterm grades was a campaign goal of ASWSU President Riley Myklebust and Vice President Amanda Spalding. Spalding said she feels very accomplished and is proud of her staff.
“It’s been a long uphill trek but we’re very proud and excited for the students to have the opportunity to have more transparency in their academic progress,” Spalding said.
Director of Academic Affairs Daniel Vickoren worked closely with Spalding on the midterm grades project. Vickoren said this year the project has been the main focus of his work.
“It’s great to be able to have this change to WSU’s regulations, which is going to affect students not just this year, obviously it’s the end of the year, but it’s going to affect students for years to come and that’s something we’re really excited about,” he said.
Vickoren said there were many barriers to overcome to achieve the midterm grades project. The knowledge of the failed 2010 ASWSU midterm grade proposal helped in building a new proposal this year that addressed faculty concerns, he said.
“Going into it we knew what opposition we would face and what points they were going to hit us on,” Vickoren said. “So we were able to be better prepared for that.”
The first committee in the Faculty Senate to review the proposal was the Academic Affairs Committee.
“What we were looking for on Academic Affairs was a way to balance both the student’s desire for some midterm indication of how they were doing with faculty concerns with being able to generate an accurate picture of the student with just a few assignments,” Committee Chair Craig Parks said.
He said the committee received excellent feedback from the faculty senators. However, in the end the committee was not able to completely address all senator concerns and all student requests, he said.
“In the end a majority of the Faculty Senate voted to put it on through and that’s probably very representative of the opinion of the faculty at large,"Parks said."That would be my guess."
Faculty Senate Chair David Turnbull spoke on the importance that the ASWSU leadership had in passing the proposal.
“The student leadership really felt that this was such an important issue for the student body here and personally I was happy to see it pass,” Turnbull said.
