Thank you The Pitt News for reporting this petition.

UPDATE ON Dec 3, 2020

According to the email that was sent out on Nov 25, 2020, by Vice Provost Joseph McCarthey and Amanda Godley, quote:

"for those cases in which the performance disruption was more severe, we will allow students to petition their dean or campus president to withdraw from the individual affected course(s) and obtain a W grade in those cases. This one-time modification to our monitored withdrawal policy will have a deadline of Wednesday, February 3, 2021 (approximately mid-way through the spring add/drop period)."

THIS POLICY CREATE AN EXTREMELY UNFAIR SITUATION FOR STUDENTS TO COMPARE GPAs WITH STUDENTS FROM OTHER UNIVERSITIES THAT HAVE P/F POLICY THIS SEMESTER. 

This policy is NOT even good enough. Allowing students to withdraw from classes at the end of the semester does not solve any problem. Imagine you have 2 to 3 classes that have exams at 3 a.m. in your time zone and you have to stay up late to take the exam or you got 0 on that exam; or you or your loved one is in the hospital and you have to take care of him 24/7, you are tired or sad but your professor is forcing you to take the exam synchronous with the whole class on the BED IN A HOSPITAL? Of cause, you can withdraw from all 3 classes that are affected, how many credits will that be? Let's take 3 credits/class on average. Three 3 credits class are 9 credits. You can take 18 credits without extra charges every semester and 18 credits - 9 credits = 9 credits. All of sudden, you are not even a full-time student. Might as well withdraw from the school. Isn't this policy ridiculous? Each credit worth $1,000 on average and after you withdraw from those classes, you just donated 9,000 dollars to somewhere without credit. Yes, people need to be kind, but as students, aren't you way too generous if you really decided to do so?

We are demanding the University of Pittsburgh to add P/F as an option this semester just like what they did in the spring term. This should not be a thing that is needed to be considered. This should be the thing that Pitt needs to do without any hesitation even there is only ONE OTHER university adding P/F policy in their grading system to keep Pitt students' competitiveness advantage and to maintain the Pitt Pride. 

People, please spread this out to Pitt Office of Provost, Office of the Chancellor, and dean of each college.

Thank you so much for your support, HAIL TO PITT

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Original

As the end of fall term 2020 approaches, multiple universities, including Penn State, OSU, Temple have changed their grading policy to Pass/Fail. Pitt should change the grading policy to S/NC for this semester again as well. There is no doubt that with this policy, students from those schools where have the Pass/Fail policy will have a higher GPA in the end. This will put students from Pitt into an unequal situation and force them to face a huge disadvantage at the very beginning to compete with students from other universities on either school or job applying in the near future. 

With the current pandemic, there are more than 10 million people are tested positive with COVID 19 in the US, and this critical situation affects Pitt students in an extremely negative way. With the number of cases increasing on Pitt campus, everyone feels imperiled. They are concerning the health of their family, friends, and the most important, their own. Regardless, the grade of this semester cannot reflect the real potential and ability of the majority of students since they have far more things to take care of other than study at this difficult time. 

And for those who cannot come back to the U.S. and have to take classes and exams online, especially international students in Asia and Australia, they will have to take the afternoon class/exam at midnight due to the time zone. There is no way for students to do what they are capable to do at that time. It is unfair for international students to sacrifice their grades as the consequence of the university wants to be looked like it is operating as normal. Well..it's not. And also, forcing students to stay awake during midnight just because professors take attendance, or they are required to take the exam synchronously is unhuman at all no matter what. Thousands of researches clearly indicate that people who stay up late are at a higher risk of muscle deterioration, diabetes, metabolic disease and even sudden death.

Presidential election, riot, human rights, pandemic, any one of these problems we are having right now will cause disturbance to students and even the whole society, and sadly, they are all coming to us together. It is unfair to put the academic result that is made under chaos into something that will affect one's entire career and life.