A motion almost two months in the making passed Tuesday in a 17-4 vote of approval. Members of the Baker University Faculty Senate passed the plus-minus grading scale.

The new grading scale came from the Educational Programs and Curriculum Committee.

The motion stated the plus/minus grading scale will be implemented at Baker University next year.

At the meeting, Merrie Skaggs, undergraduate school of education department chair, presented an amendment to the motion, which would have implemented a pilot plus/minus grading scale for the fall 2011 semester and then full implementation of the plus/minus grading scale in spring 2012.

The pilot program would have allowed students’ transcripts to reflect a traditional grade point, but on their student portal, they would have been able to see what their grade point average would have been had professors used the plus/minus grading scale.

“My first concern about the pilot is that I’m not sure that student grades will reflect effort that would be there if they were really going to get a B+ because they aren’t going to be able to get a B+,” Assistant Professor of Biology Darcy Russell said. “… I guess my other concern is that we could do this retrospectively. We could take grades that we’re going to be giving this semester and we could do this. We could take grades that we did last semester and we could do this. I’m not sure that piloting it next semester has a lot of logic for me.”

While the senators did talk about implementing the grading scale as a pilot program, that amendment did not pass.

“The voices of dissent will be the voices that got hurt most and will therefore be bias against the change,” Ryan Beasley, associate professor of political science, said. “I think we should just go ahead with it. I think this has been one of those grand areas where it’s been great to get student input, but we make the grades, and greater accuracy is an improvement.”