In an unusual move, the Faculty Senate will allow faculty to vote in an online referendum this week on whether UAF should adopt plus-minus grading.

As of press-time, voting was set to kick-off Monday on UAOnline, with a Friday afternoon cut-off, said Rainer Newberry, chair of the senate's Curricular Affairs Committee.

The Faculty Senate rarely, if ever, holds university-wide referendums, and this vote will only be advisory, Newberry said. But the senate did not want to make such a big decision without faculty input, he said.

"There are damn few things that the Faculty Senate does that have such far-reaching effects, and we wanted to make sure we did this right," he said.

In the early 1990s, UAF transcripts carried pluses and minuses as advisory grades with no grade point average impact. The university abandoned the system at the urging of the Faculty Senate, which frustrated many professors and instructors.

If re-adopted this time those little symbols would affect student GPAs. Under regent policy, a B+, for example, would be worth 3.3 rather than 3.0, while a B- would be worth 2.7.

Proponents argue the new system gives instructors a more nuanced grading tool, but critics say it could hurt student transcripts.

"Personally, I think the pros and cons of this move just about balance off," said Provost Paul Reichardt via email.

Pluses and minuses could motivate students to work harder to get better grades, he said, but assigning grades to students is hard enough in the current five-letter system.

A study conducted by UAF Planning, Analysis and Institutional Research, based on transcript data from 1990 to 1993, found that overall GPAs would drop only slightly.

University of Alaska regent policy dictates that an A+ would be scored as a 4.0, the same as an A. Consequently, any grade policy change would likely mostly impact honor students, said Ian Olson, a researcher at PAIR.

Exactly when the system would go into effect remains unclear. At a forum on the issue last Monday, Tim Stickle, a registrar at UAF, said it could conceivably be put in place next year, but he would prefer fall 2007 since the 2006 catalogs have already been printed.

Nationally, 52 percent of public four-year institutions, such as the University of Oregon and Iowa State, use pluses or minuses, according to a 2004 study by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Private colleges, like Yale and Duke, are more likely to use pluses and minuses, with 80 percent nationally employing this system, according to AACRAO.

Kent State University in Ohio began using pluses and minuses in the fall in order to come in-line with other state grading policies.

Preston Mitchum, a Kent student government senator who specializes in academic affairs, said the new grading system caused his GPA to drop from a 3.7 to a 3.5. Others had similar experiences, he said.

Kent faculty have the choice to use pluses and minuses, a policy UAF would also have. Many students taking the same course with different instructors consequently earn different grades, Mitchum said.

"I don't hear like any positivity toward the plus-minus thing," Mitchum said.

University of Alaska Southeast, UAF's Juneau cousin, already has a plus-minus system in effect. Its faculty can also pick-and-choose to use the math signs, said Brendan Kelly, dean of arts and sciences.

"We encourage people to express very strongly their grading policy so students don't run into problems," he said.

Given the choice, Kelly, who is also an associate professor at UAF, said he prefers the little math signs.

"Having letter grades is trying to sum up a lot of information into a single letter," he said.