Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 18, 1978)
mm I 1 Vol. 79, No. 81 f tiaone Oregon 97403 Wednesday, January 18, 1977 ■■gH The big D-bate confuses students By RICHARD SEVEN Of the Emerald The D-grade after five years in the academic closet has resurfaced this term. Check the most appropriate reason (s) for the return, and remember, it could affect your grade: ( ) Give teachers a more flexible and meaningful system of evaluating students' work. () Discourage students from taking clas ses pass/no-pass. ( ) Save students from failing classes. () Confuse administrators and students alike in dealing with academic require ments. () All of the above. If you answered “all of the above,” you are correct, according to University ad ministrators. The D grade, instituted last term, has be come a potential source of trouble for stu dents unaware of the. implications of the new grade. In fact, some administrators have said a D can be worse than an F. Under current University policy, the D counts as positive credit towafd University general requirements of 186 accumulative credit hours. However, a student must also satisfactor ily pass 90 percent of his or her classes at the University to graduate. This means a student graduating with 186 hours can have no more than 18 hours of D credit. If so, he or she can plan on an extended educational stay. Jane Farrand Degidio, counselor for stu dent services, says transfer and freshman and sophomore students should especially be aware of the implications of the D. Take the case of John Transfer. He comes to Oregon with 90 hours of satisfac B tory work with no D’s or F's. John divides his 90 remaining hours at Oregon into six terms of 15 hours apiece. Each term he passes all his work satis factorily, including three credit hours of D a term, totaling 18 hours of D for his two years at Oregon. John struts into Oregon Hall and applies for graduation, showing his total of 180 hours of accumulative credit. But what John doesn’t know is that a student must attain grades of A, B, C or P in 90 percent of his work at this institution. Instead of computing the 18 hours of un satisfactory hours of John’s 180 total hours, the University uses only the 90 hours he earned here as the common denominator. So John is informed that to meet the “90 percent rule” he must take 90 more credit hours of passing credit at the University without getting another D in order to graduate from this institution. On top of all this, John would never be alerted to the dangerous road he was taking, because he would never qualify for academic probation or warning under the University rules. In assessing academic probation or warning, the University uses the “65 per cent rule.” This simply means a student must pass at least 65 percent of the attemp ted work for a specific term with credit. In this case the D is considered as pas sing work. A student would also be asses sed probation if he or she received six or more hours of D, F or N for the term. This means the hypothetical transfer stu dent wouldn’t violate any of the probation or warning standards until it is 90 hours or almost two years too late. The Scholastic Deficiency Committee (SDC) has made a policy change in regards (Continued on Page 3A) 'i % I / Guardian angels Drawing by Jim Payne ‘Unsunq heroes’ cautiously cruise campus By JOCK HATFIELD Of the Emerald The fog didn’t creep in on little cat’s feet. It just floated around, sweating on our hair. We were on night watch, student patrol, boring division. Nothing exciting has happened in this division since the Mad Toilet burner was loose. In a way, student patrol members were sorry to see the burner go. They agree, burning toilets is wrong and a student patrol officer wouldn’t invite Mad Toilet over to dinner, but the reports of smoking toilets crackling over their walkie talkies added spice to the nightly routine. Members of student patrol consider themselves the unsung heroes of campus security. Each night from 10 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. they cruise the dorm area: Earl, Walton, Car Lot 34, Bean, Hamilton, Car son, back to Walton, Earl...for five and half hours. Student patrol members receive the highest wage on campus: $3.70 an hour. Anything could happen during their vigil: rape, murder, robbery, atomic attack — but so far none of it ever has. Occasionally a student patrolman is hit by flying beer cans from a dorm window. This Friday night looked quiet. Student patrol mem bers Dobbs Anderson, Chris Piepgrass, Jerry Burton and patrol head Tom Hall walked the beat. As usual they were prepared for anything. Cries from crazed dorm residents cut the fog: “You guys are chicken shit.” Tom Hall walked on unphased. He’s used to this kind of abuse. It’s the price he pays for being in on the action. Hall, a fourth-year architecture student, has walked this beat for two years. He knows every bend and curve. He could walk it in his sleep. Hall’s belt-strapped radio sputters as he heads through Bean Hall courtyard inspecting bikes. Campus patrol students spend a lot of time looking for suspicious looking bikes. He becomes cautious beneath the lighted squares of dorm rooms. “We have to be careful not to get bombed, he explains. Foggy blips of light, cluttered purple, white and blue squares of dorm room, drunk student crazies: to Hall this is the University. He seldom crosses campus during the day, and when he does it looks mysterious, even eery. Clang. Clang. Clang. A student is playing handball with a beer can against the side of Walton Hall. Damn good fun. Clang. Clang. Clang. Hall moves in for the night's first bust. “Hey, people are trying to sleep.” After his fifth revolution around the dorms, the campus starts to get smaller. The mind drifts. Hall often mentally studies for his architecture design class. Singing dorm rooms melt with his thoughts: "Don't want no short people, “The attraction was purely physical” “When we got stuck in the elevator..." Yet he must remain aware. Last quarter two student security personnel missed their first scheduled check-in time, then their second, then their break. They happened to be two women. The security head feared rape or abduction. He dispatched search parties. The two were later found asleep in a dorm room lounge. The Eugene Police Department and Campus Security are only as far as Hall’s belt-radio. In the event of an actual emergency, they are more than willing to monopolize the excitement. Two of the policemen were now rapidly moving across campus. Hall ran to meet them. It seemed some student has been playing beer-can handball on a dorm. It’s the element of chance, says Hall, that keeps him pacing the shrinking campus long after the dorm rooms have blinked out and the fun has ended. Each night is unpredictable. What will it be, a bicycle accident, a fire, vandalism? Therein lies the challenge. Hall walked through the sweating night, turning his mind to architecture.
