On March 11, 2020, at 9:26 PM, President of The University of Connecticut, Thomas Katsouleas first announced the closure of the University for March 23th, which would be followed by a transition to online classes. This announcement was conducted via email late Wednesday night before the University Spring Recess (Sunday, March 15 - Saturday, March 21) when the majority of students leave for recess after classes Friday, March 13th. President Thomas expected that this would remain the case until at least Monday, April 6. President Thomas then emailed March 17th that UConn will continue to be delivered online for the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester, including final exams. In this effort, they urged all students who can remain at home or elsewhere following the spring break to do so.

We, as students, recognize how difficult a decision to move to online instruction is and thank the University for putting our safety above all else. Given that COVID-19 has forced all classes to be conducted online, we believe that the appropriate action that the University should take is to make all classes have the option of being pass/fail and yet still count for their respective major/minor/concentration requirements.

On March 13, 2020, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that they would be transitioning to their alternate grading policy, which is a structure of pass/fail grading in the event of significant disruption outlined in Article 2.64 of their rules and regulations manual. Additionally, Smith College also announced their decision to transition into pass/fail grading for its student body. As a University, we request that we are put in a similar policy in place for the student body. Specifically, we ask that UConn provides students with the option to:

A) continue receiving letter grades for the semester

B) transition into emergency pass/fail grading that would be allowed for up to HALF of the Spring 2020 credits taken toward degree completion,

Transitioning to pass/fail grading would help reduce student stress to counteract the additional stress caused by COVID-19. Additionally, there are many personal difficulties that people may have to deal with: time zones, financially difficult times, access to the Internet, access to quiet study spaces, and unexpected home responsibilities (jobs, taking care of family members). Moreover, many students also face the difficulty of a time zone change restricting them from partaking in class and preventing them from speaking to their professors during school hours. Even more so, with the suspension of in-person activities, UConn stress-coping mechanisms that exist on campus are less available to students and many students rely on in-person office hours and review sessions for in-depth learning. Hence, creating an opt-in pass/fail option will provide the much-needed relief to students in this unexpected turn in the semester.

In this vein, we would also like to propose the option to maintain letter grading OR pass/fail with pass/failing still going towards the degree requirements that they were meant to satisfy and not apply to the amount, of course, you can pass/fail. We recognize that some students need letter grades to be eligible for Medical School or Law School or otherwise and would not like to hinder their ability to seek higher education. We would like to request that all pass/fail grades provide an asterisk (*) denoting at the bottom that the grade change was due to COVID-19 which prevented in-person instruction.

To reiterate, we believe that emergency pass/fail grading should be purely optional, as some students would like to retain letter grades for certain classes on their transcripts for future education (e.g. medical school) or to raise their GPA (e.g. seniors needing to raise their GPA to graduate).

As we all do our best to carry on with our studies while managing factors outside of our control, we’d like UConn to consider amending the spring 2020 grading policy to accommodate student needs. We hope that the University enacts this change to the benefit of the entire student community and allows students to pass/fail courses for credit without any penalty.