The Daily Bulletin Archive

At its March 16, 2011, meeting, the Buffalo State College Senate voted to approve and forward the following motion to the president for review and action:

Resolution on Midterm Grading
Introduced by the Standards for Students Committee
March 2011

WHEREAS, current Buffalo State policy requires that “students will be apprised of evaluation policies in each class at the beginning of every semester.... [and] instructors will inform students of their standing in each course by the end of the ninth week of the semester, or two-thirds of a summer session or intersemester” (Buffalo State College 2009–2011 Undergraduate Catalog, p. 25), and

WHEREAS, national empirical evidence has long suggested that midterm grade reporting—and resultant academic counseling—improves students’ academic performance (Ewing and Gilbert, 1967; Hobneck, Mudge, and Turchi, 2003; Robinson, 1990), particularly for “at-risk” populations including first-year and first-semester transfer students, and retention (Pleskac, Keeney, Merritt, Schmitt, and Oswald, 2011) by preventing students from receiving an unexpected poor grade, and

WHEREAS, Banner’s midterm grading capability was successfully tested at Buffalo State during the fall 2010 semester by University College’s Early Intervention Program for special populations (i.e., Academic Intervention students, EOP students, intercollegiate athletes, and SSSP students),

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Standards for Students committee urges the college faculty to comply with our campus policy related to providing course-standing information to our students within the designated time frame—perhaps by using the Banner midterm grading feature if it is supported by course size and pedagogy—to ensure that students have an early and realistic awareness of their course progress so they may take corrective action, if needed, to reach their educational goals.

I hereby accept the resolution forwarded to me by the College Senate. The resolution restates and supports the current policy on midterm grading. Additionally, the resolution updates the policy by noting the availability of the midterm grading capability in Banner and cites a more recent reference on the importance and benefits of midterm grades.