On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 6:55 PM, John D Morgan II <jdmorgan@udel.edu> wrote:

Dear Fred,

    It was good to encounter you today in the hallway of your building.
As you suggested, I'm sending you this e-mail message about the two
issues we discussed, as well as a third of concern to both Jim Morrison
and me.  Please share them with the rest of the members of your
committee at your nearest opportunity.  If you think it would be
helpful for me to attend your committee's next meeting to explain them
further, I should be able to do so.

    (i) Instituting a university-wide requirement that 100- and 200-level
courses used to satisfy prerequisites be passed with at least a C-,
rather than with a D-, D, or D+, as is currently the case.  In general,
a student who has done D-level work in an elementary course is likely
to do no better and probably even worse in a higher-level course.
In an extraordinary situation where for some reason a faculty member
thinks a student who has got only a D in a 100- or 200-level prerequisite
course is adequately prepared for his own course, the faculty member
could choose to admit the student to his own course by filling out the
modern electronic equivalent of the old `pink sheet'.

     (ii) Instituting a grade of A+, worth 4.0 (the same as an A),
to enable faculty to recognise extraordinarily excellent performances
by their students.  This was the system used at Berkeley when I was
a graduate student there in the 1970s.  Currently at UD, there is
sometimes a tendency for students who have done (barely) enough to
earn an A not to do even more because there's no higher reward for
them.  The possibility of earning an A+ would provide an extra reward
to motivate the best students to try even harder.

     To inhibit devaluation of the A+, I would suggest limiting the
number that could be assigned in any course to a relatively small
number, such as 5 or 10% of the total enrollment, whichever is greater.

    (iii) To address the concern raised last year by Jim Morrison
about students adding a course in the 3rd week of the semester and
showing up for class unprepared, without causing problems for faculty
teaching courses for which a one-week drop period would be too short,
I think we should have (as do some other universities), add and drop
periods of different lengths.  I think 5 and 10 days, respectively,
would be appropriate for us.  If a student wanted to add a course more
than 5 days into the semester, the student could seek permission from
the teacher to do so, and the teacher could permit the student to do so
with the equivalent of a `pink sheet'. This would provide an opportunity
for the teacher to inform the student about what (s)he had missed during
the first week of the semester, and urge that (s)he get caught up ASAP.
I see no significant disadvantage in this modification of Jim's
original proposal to shorten both the add and drop periods to 5 days,
which would have caused problems in my own department and others too.


     I appreciate, as always, your willingness to consider thoughtfully
the proposals I have made to you, and I look forward to learning the
reactions of you and the other members of your committee.


     Best regards,

     John