Midterm Grades for CSM faculty

Faculty are invited to participate in CSM's semesterly Midterm Grade Competition! The use of midterm grades helps in providing timely feedback for students to evaluate their progress, supports student success by helping students adjust strategies, and promotes early intervention strategies by advisors and other support elements on campus.

The department with the highest level of participation each semester (as measured by the percentage of faculty in the department submitting midterm grades) will host Bubo, the CSM Midterm Grade Owl! Bubo will rotate around departments each semester according to midterm grade participation rates.

bubo
  • These are grades assigned by faculty to provide students with a mid-semester assessment of their academic performance in a course.
    • Early Performance Feedback: Students will know where their grade stands in the course.
    • Motivation and Accountability: Students can get motivated to stay on track or adjust how they study.
    • Opportunity for Improvement: Students find out if they need to improve and have the opportunity to do so.
  • Around October and February.

For Fall 2025, an issue has arisen with the way that midterm grades are recorded for students who have officially withdrawn are issued a 鈥淲鈥� grade for their final grade.  The "W" grade is not autopopulating in the midterm category. Since faculty can no longer enter a 鈥淲鈥�, even at midterm, that creates a dilemma. The Registrar鈥檚 office does not have an immediate fix, but Academic Affairs is working with the Registrar and UITS to fix this issue in future semesters. For now, we need a workaround.

What Academic Affairs is asking faculty to do is enter an 鈥淚鈥� grade for all students who have officially withdrawn from their class. Why an 鈥淚鈥�?

  1. Leaving it blank would mean that we can not accurately assess participation in the midterm grade initiative.
  2. An 鈥淔鈥� would alarm students who thought they had withdrawn and now have an 鈥淔鈥� and it would also alert the student success ecosystem (advisors, coaches, SMART, Writing, SI) and create outreach to students for classes from which they had already withdrawn.
  3. The 鈥淣A鈥� stands for 鈥淣ever Attended鈥�, which has financial aid implications, and we don鈥檛 want to create any potential downstream issues for the students.
  4. 鈥淚鈥� grades are already rare and according to grading policy cannot be entered unless students struggle within the final 2 weeks of class. Since we鈥檙e not there, it will be easier to identify and replace the I鈥檚 with W鈥檚 when Academic Affairs does their later analyses, since there should not be any legitimate 鈥淚鈥� grades.

To see if students have withdrawn, faculty can either look at the final grades for the students and cross-reference OR check the last day attended. If students have withdrawn, it should be listed as the day they withdrew.

If faculty have already entered their grades (and are so inclined), it would be helpful if they can change the withdrawn students who should have received a 鈥淚鈥�, that would be appreciated. Otherwise, Academic Affairs will do what they can on the back end to clean up the data.

We recognize it鈥檚 a temporary band-aid and hope to have this issue resolved by spring midterm grade entries.