Aimed at giving students more flexibility when it comes to life changes and academic struggles, Odessa College has revised its grading policy, effective immediately.
“Students that are being graded in the spring 1 and spring 2 terms, as well as the 16-week semester, we’ll be using the new grading protocol,” Vice President for Student Services Kim McKay said.
The system is still A through F.
“What we did was update the policy to reflect some changes we made during the pandemic. These changes were really student-centered changes, so that students who may have had to exit the program because of illness or to take care of a family or job loss weren’t penalized during the pandemic and we needed to update our policy to reflect those institutional changes and make sure that the transcript legend that’s on every student’s transcript was also updated. So nothing real exciting or alarming about the change. It was really just to align better with institutional practices that were designed to support students,” McKay said.
Vice President for Instruction Tramaine Anderson said the level of rigor and opportunities.
“It’s still the same, but we learned from COVID-19 … that life happens to us all so we needed to extend that recovery process,” Anderson said.
She added that part of the grading policy update is a chance to encourage students to persist and prevent them from being derailed or deterred by failure or not doing so well.
“It gives them that opportunity to come back and progress and get better,” Anderson said.
McKay said the policy language is flexible in that it is not limited to the pandemic.
“If there was another catastrophic event. We could use the same grading (scheme). We also updated it to include the new honors program on campus. Students that are in honors courses have a designation on their transcript to indicate that they were a part of that program. … Then some of the language that was in the policy was just old language that we don’t use very much anymore. Changing the word scholastic to academic; giving students on academic probation and academic suspension an opportunity for restoration instead of the punitive consequences that are usually associated with probation and suspension,” McKay said.
“We know if students fail a class, they’re likely to not return. But some of them need a second chance, so we’ve changed our practice to ensure that they have intrusive advising and a plan to get back on track. Those changes were also reflected in the policy,” she added.
Most students see their advisor at the beginning or end of a semester to help them register for classes on their academic pathway. They usually only see him once or twice a year, McKay said.
“But an intrusive advisor, or intrusive advising, would be someone that checks in and checks up on students, making sure that they are staying on track; that their pace and progress is good, and if it’s not, making sure that they are referred to the academic supports that are available to students on the on the college campus (such as) tutoring (and) supplemental instruction. It may be student support services because of basic needs not being met. It may be emergency aid, so someone that’s really in their business and wants them to be successful,” she added.
Anderson said there is now an advisor that focuses on academic recovery. With students that are on suspension, they have an academic success coach focused on students that have fallen below a 2.0 GPA.
“She focuses on helping them get back on track and recover with their coursework,” Anderson said.
She added that it’s not dumbing down of the curriculum but helping students recover where they need it. It doesn’t change any of the strategies or teaching and learning going on inside the classroom, but offers students a chance to improve and get better.
“It’s restorative support to get them to where they need to be,” McKay said.
She added that if students are on financial aid, their GPA can’t fall below a certain level or it jeopardizes that support.
“Depending on where they were in the process, satisfactory academic progress in financial aid is linked to withdrawals and to grades. So if their GPA fell below a certain level, they may not be eligible to receive federal financial aid. A failing grade coupled with no financial aid is a recipe for a student to not return. If we can support them in some other way, then we will find a way to give students a second chance,” McKay said.
“… One of the things that we did … was there are students that aren’t eligible for financial aid and the institution was able to utilize the Koonce Foundation money to create a scholarship to restart and reset. It’s not designed to be a two-year scholarship, or even a one-year scholarship. It’s simply designed to give them a second chance at both scholarship opportunities and coursework,” she added.
Elizabeth Koonce died in 2019 at the age of 93 leaving her estate to nonprofits and higher education. McKay said her only request was that the funds go to support students.
“We were able to be creative in how we used the money. Some of the money went to emergency aid to fund that particular program and then a large portion of those funds are going to what we call the Koonce scholarship. It really is a scholarship designed to give students a second chance to restart and reset and earn a degree,” McKay said.
Part of the policy was changed to support students — the academic standards, academic probation and academic suspension.
“The grading part of that policy was really designed to align with what students were experiencing during the pandemic and then the program changes that we’ve made on campus; the implementation of an honors college; some of the (co-requisite) work that we do with developmental elemental education. … No great changes that impact students negatively, but certainly support students in the right way,” McKay said.
About five years ago the state changed remedial or developmental education so students could take a developmental course alongside a credit course. The co-requisite course would be helping with the course the student was struggling with in their degree pathway.
“It allows the student, if they do well in both, to gain that credit,” Anderson said.
McKay said students aren’t required to complete the developmental education part of the co-req before entering or completing the college credit part of the co-req. What that means is that they don’t have a grade, basically, for a course in which they were enrolled. What this does is gives us an opportunity to put in a course so that it doesn’t impact their financial aid and satisfactory academic progress. …,” McKay said.
Anderson said it works well for students to use the co-requisite model.
“Texas has been probably at the forefront of doing co-requisite models. Other states have looked at what Texas has done, so within the past at least five years, we’ve been doing really well … For us our percentage is high as for our students being successful in the co-requisite model” in math and reading and writing, Anderson said.
She said the co-requisite model accelerates students’ degree pathway.
“And the example that I’ll give you is in the past, a student would have to take the developmental course and complete it and then enroll in the college-level course so that’s two terms. And before we moved away from 16 week to eight week terms, that meant it was taking a whole year to get a college level math credit. Now they can remediate and learn at the same time, which allows them to accelerate their pathway. The interesting thing about it is a lot of students may not perform well on the college ready test, which is the TSIA, but get into the coursework, whether it’s the dev ed or the college level coursework, and it’s starts to click because they’ve been separated from math for some time. So they’re able to master the remediation and focus solely on their college credit math course,” which means they could complete the class in eight weeks, rather than a year, McKay said.
Texas has a state mandate that all community colleges had to move in the co-requisite direction.
“We were able to scaffold the course offerings. (We) started at 25% and now we’re 100% of our developmental courses that have to be offered in a co-req, unless they are scoring at the adult Adult Basic ed level,” McKay said.
She added that there are some other schools across the country that do this.
Anderson said there are also other community colleges in the state and across the country that have gone to similar grading policies.
“They may be termed differently or the wording may be different, but similar ideas of student success or student focused I would say,” Anderson said.
During the pandemic, McKay said there was a movement toward upskilling and reskilling.
“A lot of those students that come to us for upskilling or reskilling may have had some college, (but) no degree. That some college may not have been successful, so our ability to provide them with a restorative approach to education through new administrative and board policies is to their advantage if we’re going to educate the workforce,” McKay said.
Anderson noted that Texas has done a lot of innovative things not only with co-requisites, but open educational resources, teaching and learning materails that can be used and reused for free, according to the OER Commons Help Center.
“… A lot of the statewide pathway work is helping to make sure that colleges choose courses relevant” to students’ degrees, McKay said.
“The best example is not all students have to take college algebra anymore if that’s not relevant to the degree they’re pursuing. There are other college-level math courses that they are able to take. I think that really benefits students,” McKay said.
