With the close of week 8, all senator positions for the future Student Government  have been filled. The election results are as follows:

President and Vice President
Taylor Deer and Sarah Thomas

CAST Senator
Juneau Kwon

CHST Senator
Jamar Frater

CIAS Senator
Ben Lubin

COLA Senator
Alexander Van Hook

COS Senator
Alexander Lemenze

GCCIS Senator
Nicholas Cifranic

KGCOE Senator
Thomas DeMeo

NTID Senator
Francis Phiri

SCB Senator
Lauren Brockbank

Cross-Registered Senator
Bakar Ali

Graduate Senator
John LeGeyt

Greek Senator
Cory Sweet

Women’s Senator
Nikki Steinberger

Cabinet positions for the 2012-2013 are still open. Applications are due this Sunday. You can fill an applications out here. Note: Letter of recommendation letter may be submitted at the time of the interview. You do not need to attach it to your application.

+/- Grades

RIT is continuing its research into the benefits and cons of implementing a +/- grading system with the semester conversion. The idea to change grading began before RIT decided to switch to semesters but was put on hold when the conversion became definite. It was approved by President Destler as well as Academic Senate in 2009.
The scale would include:

A+/-
B +/-
C+/-
D+

But before switching, RIT wanted to see how this would affect the students, specifically financially and in sequence classes where there are multiple sections with possibly different professors (different grading styles).

Concerns about whether a C- would be considered “passing” and good enough for a prerequisite to get into the next level of classes was raised. Currently, a C- would be accepted. Also, the question about how previous grades before the scale change would be affected is a concern. At this time, however, there will be no change made to the transcripts.

There will be a study starting very shortly, for the 2012-13 year, to see how this grading scale would work and what it would all affect/change. Selected faculty will begin to use two rubrics: one that grades the current way and one that uses the +/ scale. RIT is currently looking for students who would like to be involved in this study.

Faculty will ultimately decide on whether the +/- scale will be implemented for their course.

Intersessions and Summer Sessions

With the conversion to semesters, opportunities for Intersessions, during the winter break, and Summer sessions have arose for RIT. Although summer classes were available on the quarter system, ten week sessions are still available after the conversion.

Considerable research has gone into deciding whether or not to offer courses during these breaks. What was found is that many students would take the opportunity to take classes that they may have done poorly in or not had enough time to take. It also would help students who were missing a prerequisite class from the fall semester or spring semester to make that up before missing out on the next part of the sequence.

These sessions would also hope to attract alumni and non-RIT students. Alumni could potentially take classes they were interested in during their time at RIT but never got the chance to take or even just take classes they find interesting. The benefit for non-RIT students would be the chance to take classes for transfer credit, high school credit, or to just continue their education.

With these sessions, RIT academic year would be broken down like this:

Fall Semester: 15 weeks
Winter Session: 3 weeks
Spring Semester: 15 weeks
Summer Session: 10 weeks (A quarter!)

Courses that could possibly be offered would be classes that students generally struggle in or classes that are hard to get in (i.e. popular classes). These courses would be strictly enrollment driven – so if one section did not have enough students sign up, it would close. This would help keep the costs of having these sessions up and running.

Helping to keep costs low is extremely crucial to these sessions since currently there would be no financial aid offered. Finances and how students would be housed (specifically during the winter sessions) are still being discussed and worked out.