Webster University-Greenville Metropolitan Campus

Policy on Grading

Following is the grading system for all programs of the Webster University Greenville Metropolitan Campus:

Determining Grades

Two points are significant in grading students in the Webster academic programs:

1. Students in the programs are often persons who have been away from college and academic life.  The pursuit of academic knowledge has been set aside and their main occupation has been the performance of a full-time job.  These facts need to be considered in the preparation of classes. The instructor must consider the special nature of the audience and the means by which knowledge and skills are to be developed in the classroom.  In some areas, the instructor may have to work harder because the student's academic study is accompanied by full-time employment.

2.  The quality and integrity of the academic programs must be maintained.  Students must be evaluated according to objective standards.  It is the instructor's responsibility to evaluate each student and to assign the appropriate letter grade.  Some students will succeed: some will not.  Instruction and evaluation are integral to maintaining the quality of Webster's academic programs.  Instructors must be willing to focus on both the needs of the student and the integrity of the academic program.

The primary focus of an instructor's evaluation criteria is to determine what constitutes satisfactory work on the graduate level, which is a grade of B.  Once that criteria is objectively determined, it is simply a matter of degrees as to whether a student's performance is superior, a grade of A, or marginal, a grade of C, when compared to the criteria for satisfactory work.

The second major focus of an instructor's evaluation criteria is to determine what constitutes "work that is unsatisfactory on the graduate level."  There is a minimum level below which a student's work clearly can be classified as unsatisfactory.  It is the instructor's responsibility to determine that level.  A student's ability to write grammatically correct English should be a part of that evaluation for every course.  If the student's work is unsatisfactory, the appropriate grade is F.

The grading system and the instructor's objective determination of the grades should be included in the course syllabus and verbally explained at the first class session.  

(SOURCE:  Webster University Graduate Students, September, l996.)

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