The Office of the Dean of Academic Planning & Advising (pictured above) is home to Dean Celia Easton, who is responsible for ensuring the academic success of students, specifically first year students who receive midterm grades (Julia Skeval/Editor-in-Chief).
At Geneseo, midterm grades serve as an avenue for students to track their academic progress and success throughout the semester. Faculty and staff vary in the perceived value of posting midterm grades, leading to a large discrepancy in their posting.
The Dean of Academic Planning and Advising Celia Easton said that, ideally, midterms are a true data reflection of how a student is doing in their classes. However, Easton said that, due to the different grading procedures professors have, midterm grades may not be the best indicator of academic standing in a class.
“Midterm grades in the ideal are based on meaningful data. In other words, not that maybe you got half of your work done by the midterm, but that you’ve done significant enough work to give you a sense of whether or not you have developed the skills and tools to be successful in class,” Easton said.
Easton said that the only students who are currently marked as “midterm eligible” are first-year students, whether they be freshman or transfer students.
“Sometimes people do not do them,” Easton said. “Often, I have found that those who haven’t turned them in are new to the college, so I have asked some faculty chairs to be more specific when mentoring. I don’t think anybody is doing it maliciously, I think they’re just like ‘oh, was I supposed to do that?’”
Easton said that she is often asked by faculty and staff why midterm grades aren’t reported for all students, as this is a requirement by some colleges and universities.
“We are trying to think of some other ways that we can help students earlier and this might include progress reports,” Easton said. “The progress reports may not necessarily be a midterm grade, but possibly at a different, earlier point in the semester students can have a better indication of their performance in the future.”
In order to help students who may be struggling academically, Easton said that her office looks at student midterm grades in order to reach out to those who they view need academic assistance. Afterwards, she addresses the student and their advisor in order to inform them of the student’s academic standing.
“After midterm grades are turned in, we run a report and we identify which students have at least one midterm grade of C- or less. The idea of their use is so that we can help students change some things,” Easton said.
Professor and anthropology department chair Paul Pacheco also said that midterm grades are limited to freshmen and first-year transfer students.
“We have a midterm grade policy that is for all freshmen and transfers. We get information about it about a week or two weeks before they’re due mid-semester and we get a reminder. This year we even actually had an email from Dr. Easton talking about why t was important,” Pacheco said.
Pacheco said that, due to the lack of experience these first-years have, midterms serve to track progress when they are in a new environment.
“With freshmen and transfer students, we need to be sure and keep track of their progress. They’re in a vulnerable situation having no GPA and/or very little for a GPA, so it’s a way to keep them on track and I think it’s useful for that,” Pacheco said.
Dennis Showers, the interim director of the school of education, also spoke to midterm grades’ ability to provide students with an indication of their progress in a new environment.
“I think for first-year students it’s very important because they need some feedback as to how well they’re doing. College is a new experience and is different from high school so as a tool for communicating to students where you are and how well you’re doing I think it’s good for that,” Showers said.
Showers said that he believes the use of Canvas, which can give real-time updates, enables students to have constant access to their grades and causes midterm grades to be more obsolete.
“With Canvas, if faculty are posting grades on their assignments and they use the gradebook function, students can go check their grade every day and know where they stand. I’m not sure that requiring midterm grades for all students would really improve that very much,” Showers said.
Pacheco said that he believes it is unnecessary to post midterm grades for students who are not first years because they should be aware of their academic standing in class. By handing grades back, Pacheco said, students should be able to calculate their grades themselves.
“I don’t know that [midterms grades] would necessarily be useful especially since most students should be aware enough of their progress in their classes that they would know what their midterm grade is,” Pacheco said. “They can calculate their own grades with the math that they learned in third grade.”
While Geneseo’s midterm grading policy traditionally has been geared more towards first-year students, Easton says that the school will be implementing a new app called EAB Navigator in the fall semester to provide all students with their midterm grades and enable emails to reach more students, a problem considering that, according to Easton, 60 percent of students do not read their emails.
“This system is going to try to help us intervene with all students earlier, have some communication pieces that won’t be distractions, allow us to email and it’s going to be targeted so you will only be reaching the people who need the email, and the ability to do push notifications not excessively but just to say ‘It’s really important that you go and read that email.’ And that I think people will see,” Easton said.
Editor-in-chief Julia Skeval contributed reporting to this article.