Students are stressed and scared. We are scared for our health, the health of our families, our loved ones, and stressed about our GPA’s. As a student in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at CSU Fullerton, myself and my peers are expected to constantly perform on exams. The reality is that we are having a really hard time transitioning. We did not plan for this COVID-19 outbreak to happen, but our professors are telling us that now that your exams are online, "your exams are going to be MUCH harder." That is not fair. We understand that it is hard on them to transition from an in-person classroom to an online classroom, but we are not being given much grace or understanding. We are concerned for our grades because we rely on them to get into graduate schools whether it be master’s programs, PhD programs, or even professional schools like medical school, dental school, optometry school, veterinary school, etc. Our grades matter to us. Our learning matters to us. Many of us need to take exams and perform well in our courses to apply them to exams like the GRE, MCAT, DAT, or OAT to pursue higher levels of education. Like I said, our learning matters to us.

Therefore, we ask you, the CSUF Administration, President Framroze Virjee, and the CSU system to let the students focus on learning and lower the professor's burden of grading our work by changing our grading policy at CSU Fullerton to a Pass/Fail system.

You must understand that it is hard for us to even focus on school when the entire world has stopped, but we are expected to continue performing at our peak performance as if nothing has changed.

Everything has changed. Everything is not okay.

From collected research, there are several prestigious and top universities who have already understood that this transition to online learning will lessen the burden of professor's grading and focus on student learning because student learning is the overall goal. They have changed their grading policies to a pass/fail system.

These prestigious universities include MIT, Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Cornell University, UC Berkeley, NYU, Vanderbilt University, and the list is still growing.

To be the outstanding and progressive university that we are known to be, let us add CSU Fullerton to the list of universities to accommodate the needs of their students and their well-being during these hard times.

As a university that works to advocate for basic needs and the well-being of our students, now is the time to prove it. For the sake of our student’s physical health, mental health, and overall success, it is time for the university to change the grading scale to pass/fail to accommodate those needs and allow students to continue learning without the burden and pressure of being graded. We are all facing enough burdens as it is, and this should not be one of them.