IIT-Gandhinagar to complete semester through online classes, devises new grading system

The institute will be granted P(E) or Pass Emergency or I/F or Incomplete/Fail grade. students given an ‘I/F’ grade will have one opportunity to complete the course requirement and improve their performance

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar will complete courses from the second semester of 2019-20 academic year through online classes commencing June 8. The institute has also decided not to give any grade for any course, including those completed before the mid-semester. Rather two new grades are being introduced – ‘P(E)’ and ‘I/F’ for all courses this semester.

The P(E)’ grade stands for Pass Emergency is a pass grade but will have a different connotation than the usual ‘P’ grade and will be so notated on the transcript. The ‘I/F’ grade denotes ‘Incomplete/Fail’ but will not distinguish between incomplete’ and ‘fail, the institute informed.

All students given an ‘I/F’ grade will have one opportunity to complete the course requirement and improve their performance and earn a ‘P(E)’ grade. The deadline to do so will be communicated to students well in advance, the IIT said.

Elaborating on the new grading system, Prof. Pratik Mutha, Dean (Academic Affairs), IIT Gandhinagar, said, “If a student’s performance does not warrant a ‘P(E)’ grade even after this evaluation, the ‘I/F’ grade will be converted to a traditional ‘F’ grade and the credits for this course will naturally not be counted towards the graduation requirements. Thus, an ‘I/F’ grade will not show on a student’s final official record. Neither the ‘P(E)’ nor the ‘F’ grades of Semester II, 2019-20 will be counted in the CPI (Cumulative Performance Index) calculation.”

For MTech and PhD students, the grades for thesis units will continue to be either ‘S’ or ‘U’ as is usually practiced. However, any ‘U’ grade awarded in Semester II, 2019-20 will be dropped from the student’s record. Graduation requirements remain unchanged.

Further, the institute will continue holding online classes for the second semester. As a pilot, some faculty members had conducted classes during the revised summer term. The faculty, informed the IIT, found that most students adjusted well to the online format and hence decided to go ahead with the same.

Faculty members who taught online classes during the summer term also recently conducted a workshop on online teaching to share their experiences and best practices with the faculty, the IIT informed.

Many faculty members are considering experimenting with greater use of quizzes and reading assignments, open-book examinations, oral examinations via video-conferencing, among others. Some faculty members are considering simulation-based lab work that students can perform remotely, the institute informed.