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News POLICE LOG
>>Feb. 8, 2023
10:14 a.m. Cohan Hall ACPD responded to a pre-fire alarm. Cause of activation was from a hair straightener.
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>>Feb. 9, 2023
2:40 p.m. Morgan Hall Observatory
ACPD took a report of a minor motor vehicle accident.
>>Feb. 9, 2023
9:41 p.m. King Hall
ACPD responded to a prefire alarm. The cause was a dirty detector.
>>Feb. 10, 2023
8:55 p.m. Quadrangle Road ACPD stopped a motor vehicle operating in the wrong direction on the Quad. A warning was given.
>>Feb. 10, 2023
11:49 p.m. Stearns Hall ACPD responded to an emergency call from the elevator phone. No one was in the area.
>>Feb. 11, 2023
8:58 p.m. South Prospect St. ACPD stopped a motor vehicle operating the wrong way on a one way street.
>>Feb. 11, 2023
11:38 p.m. Humphries House Community Safety responded to a noise complaint.
>>Feb. 12, 2023
12:16 p.m. Hitchcock Hall
A staff member reported an exit sign and a common room wall were found damaged. ACPD responded and created a report.
>>Feb. 13, 2023
7:39 a.m. Alumni Lot
ACPD investigated a suspicious vehicle and found it to be occupied by two people. The occupants were spoken to and sent on their way.
Latin Honors Changes Stoke Controversy Among Faculty
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Whether a student who meets the breadth requirement is awarded summa honors or magna honors then depends on the student’s final median grade and the departmental recommendation they receive for their honors thesis. A student’s median grade is the grade such that half of the student’s letter grades from Amherst and other Five College courses are above or equal to it, and half are below or equal to it. Double, triple, and quadruple courses are counted as two, three, and four courses, respectively, whereas half courses are excluded from this calculation.
A student is eligible for summa cum laude honors if they have a median grade higher than A- and receive a departmental recommendation of summa for their thesis. A student is eligible for magna cum laude honors if they have a median grade of A- and receive a departmental recommendation of summa, or if they have a median grade equal to or higher than A- and receive a departmental recommendation of magna.
All other students who complete an honors thesis and receive a departmental recommendation of any level of honors — in particular, students who do not meet the breadth requirement, have a median grade lower than A-, or receive a departmental recommendation of cum laude — are awarded cum laude honors.
The criterion for awarding English honors remains the same, with students becoming eligible for a degree with distinction if they have an overall GPA in the top 25 percent of their class.
Under the old policy, a student becomes eligible for summa cum laude honors if they receive a departmental recommendation of summa and have an overall GPA in the top 25 percent of their class. A student becomes eligible for magna cum laude honors if they receive a departmental recommendation of summa and have an overall GPA in the top 40 percent but not the top 25 percent of their class, or if they receive a departmental recommendation of magna and have a GPA in the top 25 percent of their class. All other students who receive a departmental recommendation of any level of honors are awarded cum laude honors.
The CEP’s discussions to change the policy began in the 2020-2021 academic year at the strong urging of student member Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22, said William McCall Vickery 1957 Professor of the History of Art Nicola Courtright, who served on the CEP while it was crafting the new policy. The final proposal was the result of two years spent investigating the Latin honors systems at peer institutions, compiling relevant data on recent graduating classes, and considering a variety of possible alternatives, she added.
In developing the new policy, the committee primarily sought to address concerns that faculty and students had expressed over the years regarding the fairness of the GPA criterion.
“It seemed to us unfair that you needed an extremely high GPA to receive a summa or a magna for the year-long thesis work, which many of us on the committee felt was the laudable culmination of a student’s education at Amherst,” Courtright wrote to The Student.
Provost and Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein, who serves as an ex officio member of the CEP, wrote to The Student that “[b]ecause so many students are tightly bunched in class rank, it seemed very arbitrary if someone was going to be in the top 25% or only in the top 26%--but that would make the difference between summa and magna, for example.”
In its final proposal, the CEP maintained that the use of class rank “rewards risk-averse course selection, penalizes students who have had difficult semesters, and creates stress around final cutoff points.”
The use of median grade rather than GPA is designed to eliminate the uncertainty and arbitrariness of class rank by relying instead of a fixed grade criterion. As the median grade is much less impacted by low outliers than GPA is, the new criterion is also far more forgiving, allowing students to still qualify for high honors even if they’ve
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