UC Santa Cruz to Start Giving Letter Grades

Amid an outcry from students, professors at UC Santa Cruz voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to institute mandatory letter grades for the first time in the 35-year history of the decidedly unconventional school.

The Academic Senate, the faculty’s governing body, voted 154 to 77 to require letter grades in three-fourths of all classes, beginning in the fall of 2001. Remaining classes could be taken on a pass/fail basis.

“Grades and GPAs are lingua franca in the world of academe,” said biology professor Martha Zuniga. Students who don’t have a GPA--or grade point average--have a hard time getting grants and fellowships, she said.

Professors at UC Santa Cruz, which opened in 1965 as an alternative to the more traditional University of California campuses, have long evaluated students’ performances with narrative essays rather than by assigning grades.

The university has not decided whether to continue offering narrative evaluations in tandem with the other types of grading.

Opponents of mandatory grades will have an opportunity to reverse the vote. Just 231 professors voted in Wednesday’s Academic Senate meeting. Opponents are expected to petition for mail balloting in an attempt to get participation from all 588 professors eligible to vote.

UC Santa Cruz students have opposed letter grades in demonstrations and at public meetings during the last few months. Mandatory grades have also upset alumni, who remain the biggest boosters of narrative evaluations.