What are the responsibilities of an individual faculty member?
The most important responsibilities of individual faculty members are, first, to hold their students to high and consistent standards, and, second, to use the full range of the grading scale to make clear and appropriate distinctions to match the inevitably varied quality of students’ work. In other words, there should be different grades assigned for work that is exceptional, excellent, very good, good, acceptable, and unacceptable. Faculty members owe students critical feedback along with letter grades, especially on written work. These are hallmarks of good pedagogy, to which we all aspire; the grading policy seeks to make it easier for individuals to meet these responsibilities in an environment in which grades creep up steadily without deliberate efforts to hold the line.
