The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 72, No. 7, Ed. 1 Friday, September 28, 1984 Page: 2 of 24
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Don't take my Pass/Fail away
Many Rice traditions dating from the 60s or early 70s are
emperiled in the neoconservative light of 1984. Willy's Pub and
our liberal distribution requirements are just two campus
institutions that draw students to Rice, but with which our
beloved administrators and standing committees are eager to
tamper. Another cherished and endangered part of the Rice
experience is the Pass/Fail grading system.
Many professors are upset by their impression that Pass/Fail
students do not work as hard as other students. The scenario
apparently envisioned by these profs (mostly in the "academ"
departments, according to my own experience) is a student
(typically a pre-med or an "illiterate" engineer) who carefully
calculates the precise minimum average needed to pass, and then
quits working when he has accumulated enough points to
produce that average and earn a "P.'1
This so upsets these professors that they have begun
threatening Pass/Fail students. It turns out that professors do
find out from the registrar which students are on the P/F
grading system, just before they send the final grades to be
recorded. This has enable many profs to tell their students that if
they are Pass/Fail and miss an assignment, they will fail. Of
course, other students who miss an assignment receive a grade
corresponding to their average in the course.
Now, 1 realize that it troubles professors if students neglect the
coursework or miss some lectures. It insults them that the
students do not appreciate the prof's hard work. These are both
valid complaints, for it is unfortunate for a student to take a class
and not attend all the lectures or do all the work. But such
complaints ignore the purpose of P/F grading.
Pass/ Fail grading is supposed to encourage a student to take
challenging courses outside his major, while avoiding some of
the academic risks involved. Not only are they used by S/E's and
premeds taking academ courses, but by academs taking physics
as well. Just as not all academs take physics for poets, so also do
many S/E's take advanced history, foreign language, and art
classes.
The problem for students taking an upper-level class in a
major not their own is that they are competing with experts.
More often than not, they have difficult classes in their own
majors, or perhaps even demanding extracurricular activities
(e.g. Thresher section editorship or RPC vice-presidency). They
may find it impossible to finish all the coursework in the
interesting but (to them) peripheral class, let alone make a
respectable grade.
Of course, some students take the easiest classes possible,
perhaps a foreign language which they studied for three years in
high school. But if the P/F system were weakened, even more
students would be forced to take this easy out.
The Pass/Fail system should be strengthened — and not by
extending the deadlines for changing from P/ F to a letter grade
or vice versa. Allowing students to change their grading for a
class until the end of the semester is an unfortunate Trojan Horse
which would destroy the system. Either way, it would result in a
"P" being equated with a "D" by transcript readers, because only
those who were not doing well in a class would remain in, or
change to, P/ F at the end of the semester.
Changing to a Pass, D Fail system would be equally bad,
because it would make it harder on those students taking truly
difficult courses outside their specialty. If the intent is to get
students to take challenging courses, then fine, define a group of
decidedly non-challenging courses which could not be taken
Pass/Fail.
But overall, I think the Pass/Fail grading option should be
kept the same, with one exception: professors should never be
told who is taking their class Pass/ Fail. This is a violation of the
student's privacy which could result in a student's failing a class
in which he or she had a passing average.
— Paul Havlak
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BULLDOZING THE HEDGES/by Steve McLaughlin
Arthur Scargill and Sir Ian
MacGregor — to most Rice
students, these two names are not
significant, but to a British citizen
they represent the two opposing
sides in a coal strike that is the
major issue in British politics
today.
The coal strike began six months
ago when Scargill, the head of the
National Union of Mineworkers
(NUM), called out the coal miners
to protest government plans for
closing unprofitable mines. The
British coal industry is run through
the Coal Board, currently under
Sir Ian's leadership. This board
has, for the past twenty years, been
closing down coal mines as the
demand for coal shrank. Indeed,
under Labour governments,
traditionally sympathetic to the
needs of coal miners, over 335 coal
mines have been shut down since
1964. Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher's mine-closing policies
are therefore hardly without
precedent.
The cost to the British taxpayers
of operating the doomed mines
comes to £1 million per day.
England's planned mine closures
coincide with large-scale cutbacks
in coal production in both France
and West Germany. The trend in
Europe toward the manufacturing
of high-technology goods and
away from the old smoke-stack
industries has been a major factor
in this shift away from coal.
Despite the inflexible dictates of
the market economy, Scargill
called a strike and, more
astoundingly, the miners followed
him. Why? The answer is political
in nature. Scargill, an avowed
Marxist, wants desperately to
bring down Thatcher's govern-
ment, however impractical that
may be after the conservative
landslide of last year. Scargill has
put himself in a position from
which he cannot back down. This
would not have happened had Sir
Ian taken a firm line against the
unions, but by making concessions
at the bargaining table he helped
Scargill's position.
The miners follow Scargill
because, while they know the
market won't buy their coal, he
promises that they can make the
government buy it instead.
In the long run the real losers in
the strike are the coal miners
themselves. They strike and elect
leaders such as Scargill not
because they are ignorant to
economic realities, but because the
government backs down and has
failed to clarify the situation for
the miners. As a result of the
government's indecisiveness the
British people have had to endure
nine rounds of negotiations
between the NUM and the Coal
Board and a series of bloody riots
in which non-striking miners have
attempted to cross the picket lines
and work.
The solution is for the Thatcher
government to stop backing away
from what must be the solution to
the crisis, which is a shutdown of
the mines. The tragedy would be if
this incident became an exception
to the Thatcher tradition of
decisive leadership. Please don't
disappoint us, Mrs. Thatcher.
MRESHER
Paul Havlak
Editor
Todd" A. Cornett
Business Manager
Bev Blackwood Advertising Manager
David Friesenhahn News Editor
Ian Neath Fine Arts Editor
Scott Snyder Sports Editor
Susan Buchanan, Pam Truzinski Photo Editors
Brandon Rigney Back Page Editor
Sarah Jordan Production Manager
Robyn Klahr Managing Editor
John Knapp Copy Editor
Mark M. Mitchell Senior Editor
Assistant Editors L. Gene Spears (Fine Arts). Tony Soltero (Sports),
Steve Mollenkamp (Sports)
Contributing Editors Duaine Prvor, Andy Mitchell, Steve McLaughlin
Foreign Correspondents Tom Morgan. Melissa Cox, Harry Wade
News Staff Kimberlee Barrett. Ian Davidson, Suzanne Fitzpatrick,
Robert Hess. Scheleen Johnson, Andy Kopplin,
Shao-lee Lin, Tibor Roberts, Jana Sanchez,
David Schnur, Shelina Shariff, Cheryl Smith
Jeff Michel. Mitch Neurock, Keith Nickerson
Fine Arts Staff John Knapp, Sarah Jordan, Frances Egler,
Mike Voigt, Valerie Rohy, Mark Osterman,
Carolyn Austin, Marie Lawson, Wendy Sterba, Cheryl Smith,
Carrie'Blum, Karin Murphy, Steven Spears
Sports Staff Ted Andrews, Warren Clyborne, Jim Colton,
Joey DiGregorio, Jay English, Kevin Gass,
Andy Kopplin, John Lippert, Mark Matteson,
Stephen McVea, David Schafer, Antonio Torres
Photography Staff Mike Gladu, Diane Gilabert, Mike Cherubino,
Jill Goodman, Patrick Lynn, John Knapp, Art Rabeau,
Harold Turner, Kristi lsacksen, Tibor Roberts
Graphics Mike Harshman, Scot Brooks, Dan Borden
Production Staff Rick Ary, Mary Ashkar, Elise Bauman,
Bill Bellis, Erin Blair, Lori Bryngelson,
Jennifer Corkill, Lisa Gray, David Hardy,
Peggy Harris, Stephanie Kozinski, Karin Murphy,
Sandhya Nayak, Karen Nickel, Valerie Rohy,
Geoff Stafford, Kristen Swartwout, Ruthie Woerner
Business Staff
Assistant Business Manager Susan C. Brown Snook
Assistant Advertising Manager Crystal Davis
Advertising Production Assistant Ashley Stainback
Subscription Manager Kathi Fletcher
Student Staff Assistant Carlos Soltero
Circulation Sean Daichman, Howard Goldman, Mark Mitchell
The Rice Thresher, the official student newspaper at Rice University since 1916, is published
each Friday during the school year, except during examination periods and holidays, by the
students of Rice University. Editorial and business offices are located on the second floor of the
Rice Memorial Center, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, Texas 77251. Telephone (713)527-4801 or
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$15.00 domestic. $30 00 international, (via first class mail). The opinions expressed hereinare
not necessarily those of anyone except the writer Obviously
®I984, The Rice Thresher. All rights reserved.
The Rice Thresher, September 28, 1984, page 2
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Havlak, Paul. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 72, No. 7, Ed. 1 Friday, September 28, 1984, newspaper, September 28, 1984; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245569/m1/2/: accessed June 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.