CUNY is adjusting its schedule again. Last week we paused the semester to transition to online teaching, and now we're supposed to pause again from this Friday until next Wednesday. Spring break, later in April, will be cut short to compensate.
I have to admit I'm a bit confused by this. My students and I just had our first online session yesterday, and now we're supposed to ... stop? For a week? And then start up again? And then pause again for part of but not all of spring break a couple of weeks later?
I assume what's happening is that a bunch of professors are flailing, and a bunch of students aren't able to keep up with profs' demands—for technical reasons, and/or because those demands are unreasonable. But still, it's a mess.
One piece of good news today, though: Not only is CUNY giving all students a credit/no-credit option for this semester, they're going to allow students to switch to C/NC up to 20 days AFTER they've seen their grades.
Under the previous proposal, students were going to have to guess whether the grades they were going to get were going to screw them over enough that C/NC was going to help them. Now they don't have to guess. Cheers.
(I've already started hearing from students about professors who have completely unrealistic expectations for what can be achieved in this ad-hoc online half-semester. So CUNY giving students tools to limit the damage such profs can do to them is a very good first step.)
