Every campus has its legends. Most seem to pertain to statues that will do something unusual should a virgin pass by them. There’s also the famous legend that if your dorm roommate commits suicide you get A’s for the semester.
Another campus urban legend has come to my attention. It isn’t nearly as coloful, but it reappears with such regularity that I think it really is deserving of urban legend status. The legend is this: The requirements to get a Pass when taking a course Pass/Fail have changed.
At our college, students may take some courses Pass/Fail. If they get an F, then an F appears on their transcript and is part of their grade-point average. If they do not get an F (that is, if they get a D- or above) they will get a P on their transcript, and it is not factored into their grade-point average at all.
It never fails that some panicked student will show up in my office mid-semester (or, even more amusingly, during finals week) saying that they heard from a friend that in order to get a P, you now need a C- or better. So I show them the webpage online that contains the P/F rules. They say that maybe the rule was changed since the rule was published. I ask whether it makes sense to them that the college would change an important rule like this mid-semester, and fail to update the webpage. This reassures them somewhat, but they say they are going to check with the registrar anyway.
My hypothesis for the origin of the rumor is that someone simply assumes that a D is not a “passing” grade, and argued to their friends that clearly you need at least a C- to get a P, and it spreads from there.
Frequently the campuses are swept with rumors (true and untrue) about new date-rape drugs, strange foreign diseases, and weird, dangerous chemicals seeping from secret laboratories, but for an undergraduate, ULs about the poison of the week have no where near the immediacy of a threat to one’s GPA. Students have a high level of anxiety about grades to begin with, without the college suddenly and capricously changing the requirements! The rumor also thrives on the level of red tape encountered in institutions of higher learning. At most colleges, students are issued a thick book of rules and regulations that nobody reads. What student hasn’t, at some point, run afoul of some rule, only to have a school offical snottily point out that that the Manual of Undergraduate Study, Appendix C, Section 3, paragraph four clearly states that Form 8-B-11-c must be completed and submitted to the to Office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts eight weeks before graduation . . .
Has anybody else encountered this UL? Any similar ones to share?