By: Melissa Gutierrez Gonzalez, Pamela E. Harris, Alicia Prieto Langarica, and Ying Tang

Dear Professors,

We see and acknowledge all of the work you have done to migrate your classes online as you live through the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of you are doing this work while also homeschooling your kids and dealing with uncertainty, illness, and the death of loved ones.

Through it all you have tried to keep a sense of normalcy for your students and you have continued to build learning communities to facilitate intellectual growth. We thank you for all you have done. Yet, we now ask you to do one more thing: extend grace in your final grading.

We recently compiled data on the experiences of undergraduate students during this crisis and our preliminary findings (see figure above) make one thing quite clear: Our students are in pain and are attempting to learn through the uncertainty, mental health struggles, trauma, illness, and death that this pandemic has brought; they are dealing with a tremendous amount of stress.

Much empirical evidence shows that mental health difficulties interfere with academic studies, even during pre-pandemic times (American College Health Association, 2015). In general, stress and learning are correlated as an inverted-U, whereby performance is impaired when there is an extreme high level of stress, and especially if the task at hand is challenging (Shors, 2004).

As we approach the final weeks of the spring semester and as you begin making decisions on how you assess students, we encourage you to find grading schemes that benefit students individually, such as weighing pre-remote instruction assessments to benefit each student individually and giving chances to make up work or replace lowest grades.

However you adapt your grading schemes, we ask that you center equity rather than equality. Treating all students equally assumes that they all have the same access and resources. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it is that this could not be further from the truth.

Best regards,

Your colleagues and students

References
American College Health Association (2015). National College Health Assessment II: Spring 2015 reference group executive summary. Hanover, MD: Author. Retrieved from http://www.acha-ncha.org/reports_ACHA-NCHAII.html.

Shors, T. J. (2004). Learning during stressful times. Learning & Memory, 11 (2), 137–144.