Through these troubling times, Prince George’s Community College has acted swiftly and admirably. While there have been drastic changes implemented into our education, they are vital in protecting our community. However, while these changes are necessary, they will also greatly affect the majority of our peers. These are frightening times, many of our peers are parents who have lost their jobs, parents that must watch over their children who otherwise would be in school, many are young students who have also lost their jobs, or maybe even are required to work more as their jobs are essential businesses, many are in non-ideal environments that don’t usually allow for online classes. These and many more difficult situations are actively going on in our peers lives. on top of the anxiety resulting from this pandemic, our peers will be in an overwhelming state as they try to balance the new reality and our new education system. It is within that reason that I, along with my peers, request for Prince George’s Community College to make all classes pass/fail or at least implement an updated grading policy for this semester. We greatly appreciate the PGCC faculty, the state government and the department of education for all their hard work and ask that they give us leniency during these frightening times.

Update: PGCC has come out with a statement saying that they will not make any changes to the grading policy to ensure the ability to transfer letter grades remains intact. This is where I propose a middle ground. If the college will not give us a pass/fail semester, there should at least be changes made to the letter grading policy. A brief example is an A-B-C grading scale with no curve. The modified grading scale would be A: 80-100, B: 79-60, C: 59-0. As I stated in the original text, all we ask for is some leniency, and if we work together we can find a middle ground.