Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I don’t know if I should talk about this in the student friendly version.

I have gotten word from one of my co-teachers that from now on, all lecture and lab classes, either in science, computer science, or engineering, will now have only one grade.

So if a student fails, he has to repeat both, a total of usually four units (but five for our biology-chemistry merger) but equivalent for six (or seven) hours a week.

I have already seen a lot of students who had to drop several subjects they are supposed to take regularly because of this policy which has already been in effect before the basic and intermediate computer programming classes.

Now there will be more of these instances in my role as academic adviser in the future, particularly in computer science and engineering courses, because most of their majors both have lecture and lab components, because more than fifty percent of the students in those courses, all batches are irregular already, and thus have a better (or that worse) than average chance of failing another subject – or in this case, two.

It is also a bad thing for the students because even though they concentrate on the lab subject and should have passed if the grades are separate, if they do not do well in the lecture, they have to repeat both, and pay the additional laboratory fee all over again.

The percentage of the combined grade is supposed to be sixty-forty as default, with the teachers of both subjects being allowed to alter it if they deem necessary, with the passing still around the sixty percent mark.

Let’s say a student does not do well in the lecture, and only gets fifty five percent. For the overall grade, that’s equivalent to thirty three percent.

In the lab, he doesn’t even attend regularly, and thus gets only sixty eight percent of the total requirements, with the passing at seventy percent. In the final computation, that’s an additional twenty seven percent.

If the grades had been separate, this student would have failed, but since the grades are merged, he passes!

Sure it’s an advantage to the student, but is that really the kind of student we want to cultivate?

Of course there’s also the complication of having to accommodate those students from the previous batches who only have to repeat one of the subjects. That’s something more to explain to the registrar’s office.

Session 943 fails both lecture and lab. Class dismissed.