Pass/No Credit: Robie Street High’s Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free-Card
Written by Elijah Walsh
Thumbnail & Banner Photo by Elijah Walsh
Somewhere in my two-and-a-half-hour conversation with seasoned Saint Mary’s finance professor, Mahmoud Moh’d, the subject of the university’s academic rigour came up in the form of a powerful physical metaphor.
He mentioned the dean’s list wall of fame on the first floor of the Sobey Building, which has inductees, who were able to meet the mark of the 3.7 CGPA throughout their undergrad tenure, since the building opened in 1997. He made the point that despite the benchmark of 3.7 staying the same throughout the time the display has been up, each subsequent year’s entries have grown somewhat exponentially, while student enrollment has roughly stayed the same. The wall is full as of 2019, and if the dean’s office continued to expand the display to include the members since, it wouldn’t be hard to witness any single year’s entries take up outsized space thanks to what Moh’d and others call, “Grade Inflation”. Merriam-Webster defines grade inflation as “the assigning of grades higher than previously assigned for given levels of achievement”, which fits the bill very well to describe the recent evaluation trajectory given the influences at hand.
Now, is grade inflation a bad thing? Like monetary inflation, there are many schools of thought that range from keeping currency value hyper-stable or even deflationary, to keeping unemployment low above all else to the neglect of any inflationary impact. However, looking at the intent of the parties involved in both cases adds lots of perspective and rationale. If we imagine students as the producers that artificially increase (or experience increases in) the price of the same product (or GPA), there’s always going to be immediate relief as central bankers (or employers) always need time to recalibrate to the inflated new price points (or GPAs) and raise interest rates (or recruitment standards) to cancel the effect. In economics, this is called the response lag, and it ultimately makes inflationary increases in GPA very attractive to students due to the delay in negative employer reception in the short term.
From my anecdotal chats with peers, this practice has had good or indifferent reception as scholarships become more accessible (although more competitive) for students in higher academic standings, and keeps struggling students out of academic probation or worse circumstances. Whether grade inflation is caused by professors’ inattention to internet workarounds, university-supported grade-easing to keep existing students happy to avoid drops in enrollment, or other reasonings, it is happening, but that’s another big article for another day. Today, I will focus on the Saint Mary’s student-led initiative that doesn’t have the beneficiary response lag like systematic grade inflation, arguably hurting more students than it helps: The Pass/No Credit System.
Photo by Elijah Walsh
Initially introduced as a COVID measure to ease the pressures on students during the chaotic winter 2020 semester, the pass/no credit regime was arguably adopted way past its intended use after the dust settled. The rationale behind the system’s first adoption made sense: give students an out in the form of GPA neutrality for grades that semester after Covid threw life into chaos. This was both an academic decision as students' grades couldn’t accurately be measured with rushed pivots to school online, and a practical/compassionate decision as the looming threat of the unknown, among other factors, made winter 2020 a hotbed for poor mental health that wouldn’t help anyone's study habits. It’s important to note that Saint Mary’s may not have come to this solution independently, as almost every other Canadian university opted to allow lower/failing grades to stay GPA neutral for that dreaded semester, so not following suit (if they had chosen to stick with the status quo) would have looked glaringly cruel.
Fast forward to today, and the scheme remains with the same “no questions asked” approach we saw four years ago. The option to display your grade as “Pass (P)” or “No Credit (NC)” instead of your earned letter grade is now applicable for up to 12 credit hours, or 10% of your program. What this means in practice (if a student wants to display the highest possible GPA), is that a student can request to apply this exemption to the worst performing course(s) they take each year to boost their numbers. With only a couple of exceptions, this means that students who find value in raising their grade point average above all other metrics will plan out their degrees to apply the 10% allocation to their toughest courses, which are often their Major study courses. The regulations allow for up to 50% of major or minor concentration courses to be covered, which is more than enough to apply to many programs that have lower requirements.
So, why is pass/no credit this dubious, existential system I’m sizing it up to be? It’s ultimately a get–out–of–jail–free-card we as Saint Mary’s students are flaunting out in the open that devalues our degrees on an institutional level here at Saint Mary’s, in a world with no get–out–of–jail–free cards.
The fact is, no other university in Atlantic Canada offers this much leeway for presenting grades this way, or less generously, affords students this much allowance to misrepresent GPAs. Dalhousie University holds this option only for “exceptional extenuating circumstances”, and the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) brought the system back for winter 2023 after extensive strikes disrupted learning. Both these cases seem very reasonable, as there are legitimate grounds that the grades earned in that period were not what the student was capable of above and from no fault of their own. My issue with the Santamarian regime is that we cast a large, indiscriminate net overall students to effectively hand out scholastic freebies (and a significant number of freebies at that), where there could have been genuine learning that we, our parents, the government, and taxpayers overwhelmingly paid for.
Moving away from the personal learning benefits students lose by being less occupied with their pass/no credit(ed) classes, fresh/prospective graduates can’t act like this doesn’t raise more questions from recruiters in an already tough job market. Saint Mary’s has had a long history of being known as “Robie Street High”, the place for some degree of learning for those that barely made it through secondary school. In recent years, Saint Mary's administration has made huge inroads in building a much better scholarly image of the university as a place for serious learning in the form of investment in infrastructure, which allows for more specialised programs (and greater MacLean’s rankings). Unfortunately, the pass/no credit system seemingly has the potential to throw obfuscation into the mix, with employers inevitably having a harder time bringing on students from an institution with a more unreliable, but no-less-important, benchmark structure than other comparable institutions. If they’re under the perception that this practice is rampant in a world where the demand for jobs is nothing short of explosive, it throws more doubt into the CV integrity equation where there doesn’t need to be any more than there already is.
While my analysis so far has found more concerns than assurances on the system’s broader implementation, it would be wrong for me to stop there and discount the real benefits this policy generates for the individuals who utilise it, especially if its use is in good conscience. While the data is very sparse as this is a relatively novel practice in the world of academia, students have told me that pass/no credit utilisation means much more mental health well-being in a world of pressures, academic or otherwise. Especially up until recently when exams could be worth close to half of one’s course grade, and other grade inflation considerations like scholarship/academic probation thresholds put pressure on students to meet arbitrary lines in the sand, pass/no credit offers timely peace of mind where other avenues are either much more convoluted or even unattainable.
I hope it’s clear from this article that I think the pass/no credit system, while advantageous in the short term and often warranted for real, extenuating circumstances, is destined to rescind some degree of academic value from our institution's GPA reliability. Through the loss of interest in learning and negative external perception, student outlook doesn’t look great, especially considering the slower effect of grade inflation compounding the consequences. Back to the monetary inflation example, many people will be ok with the current status quo if the short-term benefits outweigh the risks of inflating an already “outdated” evaluation metric. In contrast, others will want to keep GPAs more comprehensive to keep the benchmarks more stable and reliable if they’re perceived as valuable to them and others.
Regardless, like all get-out-of-jail-free-cards, they’re unilateral pardons, personal abdications of responsibility to the highest order. Going forward, students should treat this option with respect for what it represents and decide if their circumstances outweigh the system’s potency for that abdication, if there is still interest in keeping the value of a Saint Mary’s GPA intact now, and into the future.