C Minuses

[hungry_ghost]

Overall, I'm OK with it, except what about C minus? It will be a 1.67, so that doesn't seem like "passing." 

Anyway, if I understand correctly, your department previously used to assign anything between 70 and 77 as a C and now 70-72 is now going to be a C-? Unless you also want to tighten up standards, I can't really see the rationale for not counting a C- as passing for the purposes of the prerequisite.

This is how I read it too. If we say that that 70-79 is the C range, previously, a grade of 71 would have been a C,  which translates to 2.0. Now, a 71 will be C-, a 1.67. The standard for getting into the next level course won't change, 71 would get you in before and it still will get you in. But I agree that "C minus seems like such a cruel grade."

[Caracal]

But I agree that "C minus seems like such a cruel grade."

Honestly, when I graded with a +- scale C- tended to be a generous grade that I gave to students who I could have, and maybe should have given Ds to.

[Hibush]

But I agree that "C minus seems like such a cruel grade."

Honestly, when I graded with a +- scale C- tended to be a generous grade that I gave to students who I could have, and maybe should have given Ds to.

I suspect that many C- are gifts to failing students. It would be a cruel grade if it meant a student passed a class and could not repeat it (unlike a D+), but it also disqualified them from taking more advanced courses (unlike a C).

[Aster]

I suspect that many C- are gifts to failing students. It would be a cruel grade if it meant a student passed a class and could not repeat it (unlike a D+), but it also disqualified them from taking more advanced courses (unlike a C).

This. I am well familiar with this practice at Caribbean and (some) Latin/South American medical schools.

Sometimes we get faculty job applicants who "graduated" from these medical schools. When I say "graduated", I mean it very loosely. That is because almost every single course grade on their medical school transcript has a C- on it.

I suppose these people apply to be professors at Big Urban College because they would only have a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting licensed as a physician in the United States. What stinks is that we are so desperate for warm bodies to teach is that we actually hire these people sometimes. Oh my God most of them are such a headache to work with. They teach their courses directly from a publisher-provided can. They make their students read aloud from the textbooks during class time. They give like two assessments for the whole course. They don't answer emails. They don't attend meetings. They're absent frequently. It's like having children as colleagues. 

[zuzu_]

My institution and department do not have any codified guidelines regarding percentages and letter grade equivalents. That is left up to the instructor. Some instructors use points and no percentages. The only "rule" would be that C- is 1.67 for GPA purposes, so below the 2.0 that is generally considered to be satisfactory, and thus not-quite-satisfactory.

[Dismal]

Just as a counterpoint, I teach in a department which decided several years ago that a grade of C-minus would no longer fulfill major or minor requirements. The rationale at the time was that a C- didn't suggest a high level of mastery in course content and that we wanted our program's graduates to go into the world with a greater degree of competence in the subject matter. I have mixed feelings about such a rationale, but consistently applied, it's a policy I can live with.

My colleague who teaches a required masters level course thought for years that we had this policy - that a C- didn't satisfy the degree requirement and students would then have to retake.  She never gave less than a C- even when the grade should have been a D or F. It turns out that a C- does satisfy the degree requirements and she unknowingly had been passing some pretty terrible students all along.