P/NP course grading policy for Fall 2020 and Spring 2021

Advice for choosing grading option

The pandemic and remote instruction have greatly upended the plans and lives of our students. Some students have said that it is simply impossible to learn the same amount in these semesters as they could have learned in a regular semester. For many students, hopes and dreams for this semester have been dashed, and the faculty join students in mourning this sad truth and we offer condolences to everyone whose future plans have been changed as a result of this global pandemic.

Human lives depend on the work of engineering teams. COE faculty believe it is best for our students to join these teams as content experts. We encourage students to achieve mastery. It is better to learn a few things very well instead of many things poorly. Students are encouraged to carefully consider the course load that they can realistically handle. We suggest reducing course loads and enrolled units to a level commensurate with ability to successfully learn the material — despite the pandemic and remote instruction. 

We acknowledge that facing this reality can feel very unfair when the reduced ability to successfully learn the material is not the fault of our students. For some students, the right choice may be to P/NP certain courses so that mastery can be achieved in other courses in the few weeks that remain in the Fall 2020 semester. 

For the Spring 2021 semester, however, we strongly urge students to enroll in a course load that can be realistically handled, this will vary from student to student depending on their personal circumstances. Aim to master the material — engineers will need to understand content later in their professional careers. The possibility of P/NP in Spring exists to provide a safety net — students should only use it in response to unexpected events in case they need to offload the pressure to succeed. P/NP is not intended to enable students  to carry heavier course loads, for example, or to add a double major. 

We understand that these are hard choices. It is important for students to know that there are many risks involved in choosing P/NP for courses, and many of those risks are of an uncertain nature. We encourage students to keep their focus first and foremost on the learning side: In engineering fields that are constantly evolving, students likely do not know which courses are actually going to end up being important for them. A C- level of understanding might not be enough to even pass a subsequent course, much less excel in it. These subsequent courses cannot support students’ attempts to learn two courses’ worth of material at once — it might even be impossible. Here, we strongly encourage students to seek guidance from their faculty advisers and the instructors in courses for which students are considering P/NP. The faculty can tell students whether there are course pathways by which they can make up the gaps in their understanding, as well as whether there are parts of the discipline that students might be inadvertently foreclosing as a result of gaps. Because this kind of advice requires a mature and deep understanding of the intellectual disciplines themselves, neither ESS nor peers are likely to be able to adequately advise students here. Students should ask the faculty.

Although less important than learning, we need to note that there might be career consequences of Ps on students’ transcripts. We cannot be certain, but this could have a negative impact on acquiring internships, getting a permanent job, joining research groups or REU programs, joining course staffs, admissions to graduate/professional schools, etc. A P grade in Fall 2020 or Spring 2021 could be interpreted as a C- since people know that optional P/NPs are likely to be taken by students who aren’t keeping up with the course material well. For example, a student’s transcript could end up looking worse to others if there are Ps instead of Bs. The impacts here will only become clearer in the future, when it will be too late to actually act on that clarity. This is unfortunate, and we encourage students to ask their faculty adviser for guidance if they have questions.