By Malavika Libish
The completion of a Community Project or Internship (CP/I) is an integral part of the AUC experience. As a part of AUC next, the institution has modified the grading system of the CP/I from graded to pass/fail starting from the Autumn semester of 2023. This change came about owing to feedback from both students and teachers alike, who disliked the “graded” concept of the CP/I.
In the former graded system, students were required to write detailed descriptions of their experiences at their internships or community projects. Based on these, the assigned assessor would grade the student. According to CP/I coordinator Dr. Maurits de Klepper, “the former system was more assessment based, so there were four assessments and they were graded with the grading scale that was in practice at the time.” In the past, the focus was more on this “reporting” of the experience rather than the quality of the work itself.
Kyran Smits, a third-year Science major, has stated that she appreciates the change made in the system and was glad to have done her CP/I in the pass/fail system. “I would have spent a lot of time on trying to get a high grade for the report, which could potentially have detracted from the time that I actually spent on my CPI itself,” Smits adds.
Furthermore, students with bad experiences at their CP/I may attempt to cover up the problems they faced to get a better grade. “In the previous system, I would imagine that some students would sugar-coat the experience to make a better impression on the assessor so that they would award them higher grades,” Dr. Daniel Kontowski explains, who recently started assessing CP/Is. “The pass/fail system allows them to admit exactly that and draw conclusions,” he continues.
Based on student evaluations, students expressed feeling that they weren’t being graded fairly in the former system. Since the CP/I grade would contribute to their GPA as well, several students were concerned about getting a good grade in the CP/I. Considering that all CP/I assessors have varying work experiences, the grading also changes based on their own personal experiences. “Personally I think it is a positive change because from what I’ve heard from other students that did their CPI, they felt that the person who was grading them was not really being fair,” Tara Fransooijs adds, a fourth-year Social Science student. While she has not completed her internship yet, Fransooijs has stated that this was a common opinion amongst her peers.
According to de Klepper, the shift to this new grading system has been in the works for a long time. This was because several people, including the Management Team, needed to be convinced of the advantages of a pass/fail system instead of a graded system. “The change came from the CP/I coordinators, but also from the assessors who didn’t feel comfortable using grading rubrics, and also from the Student Council,” de Klepper says. It should also be noted that the students’ responses in the evaluations also contributed to this decision. He went on to explain that the main goal of this shift is to allow the students to attend to the experience itself and not the paperwork.
For the new system of assessment of the CP/I, students are required to create an initial learning plan. Following this, they must report on the progress made towards their learning plan in a ‘Midterm Learning Plan Reflection Update’ and then submit their final reflection report. “If done well, the assessment criteria tended to be stricter in the LP [Learning Plan] stage and more leniently applied as we move towards the FR [Final Report], especially in the Autumn and Spring when coursework tends to pile up,” Dr. Kontowski explains.
An additional change that can contribute to a student’s grade is that now the evaluation made by the student’s supervisor at their community project or internship will count towards the CP/I grade. This means that if their evaluation is not good, the student can still fail. So while students can focus less on the paperwork, they must still concentrate on the learning aspect of the CP/I.
Creating more provisions for the assessors and students to meet one-on-one to discuss their experiences is one of the next changes the CP/I department plans to make in the upcoming years. The assessors themselves never actually meet with the students. Students do, however, have the provision to contact their assessors. “The rules are new to students as well, so it is not uncommon for the students to reach out with questions about the rubrics,” Dr. Kontowski comments. Students email their assessors and even request meetings for clarification on their submissions and ideas on how to improve their work. “In general, AUC is a bit of an outlier among the UCs as we award credits for CP/Is, so that requires some quality control, but the move to pass/fail is a step in the right direction,” Dr. Kontowski adds.
The Herring 